An Affair in Nagano
by Muphrid
Summary: Five years after the fall of the Organization, Shiho Miyano calls Shinichi Kudo to Nagano to help search for a missing colleague, but bringing the detective back into her life threatens to expose the secret tragedy of her advisor, the cursed nature of Shiho's work, and the feelings she concealed from Shinichi all those years ago.
1. The Girl Full of Secrets

There are some things you don't forget: how to ride a bicycle, turn a wrench, or hold a knife strong enough that it can't be easily pried from your grip.

It was 5:30 on a Friday afternoon in Suzaka, just across the river from Nagano City. On a quiet street just about a kilometer from Suzaka Station was a six-unit apartment building. The unit furthest to the left belonged to Amari Kagura, a graduate student at Shinshu University. I stood in front of Amari-san's door with a grocery bag slung over my shoulder, carrying milk, butter, and vanilla extract. We'd planned to do some baking that night for a party over the weekend, and Amari-san had asked me to bring some ingredients for icing. Instead, I'd found her door ajar, with obvious toolmarks on the knob.

I lowered the grocery bag slowly, trying not to make a sound, and I drew a small, five-centimeter knife from my waistband. I held it with the blade pointing downward in my fist, and that feeling was all too familiar. Years ago, whenever a strange sound woke me up at night, I'd reach for that knife and carry it in hand as I looked around my home and satisfied myself that no one was coming. It had been a long time since then, but I still carried that knife with me every day, and as I nudged Amari-san's tan-colored door open with my pinky finger, the knife in my opposite hand felt comfortable and safe. Perhaps, in truth, I had never let go of it.

I pulled the door open slowly and stayed behind the threshold. The lights were off. The main room and the kitchen were as dark as a graveyard at midnight, and her alarm system had been disarmed. Knife still in one hand, I checked my phone with the other. She still hadn't called me back or answered my text messages. Perhaps it was still too early, but I smelled something foul in the air, and in a matter like this one, there was no time to waste. I flipped through my contacts, and I made a call. _He_ picked up right away.

"Well, well, look who it is," he said with juvenile impishness. "I never thought I'd see the day where you called _me_ for a change. What's the occasion?"

"I need you," I said quietly, watching the dark doorway.

"I'm sorry, can you say that again, please? I'm ready to record now."

If I could've glared at him through the phone, I would've, but I had to keep calm and steady. "I'm at my colleague's home. She didn't show up to the lab today, and now I'm at her doorstep. The unit's been broken into, and she's not answering her phone. I'll say whatever you want some other time. Right now, I need you."

The other end of the line went quiet for a moment, and after a pause, he said, "I'll be right there."

I thanked him, hung up, and sat down beside my bag of groceries. In spite of the danger Amari-san could be in, my heartbeat was steady, and I could be patient. Like with that knife, it'd been a long time since I relied on Kudo Shinichi in a time of need, but there was something familiar and comfortable about that, too.

* * *

Whatever you think you know about Kudo Shinichi, forget it. He was nothing like his popular image. The public story of Kudo Shinichi was of a teenage prodigy who had taken a short hiatus from public life in high school before reaching international stardom. He and his family cultivated an image of a fashionable, savvy detective who always fought for what's right, and they turned that mechanistically into a marketing juggernaut, selling Kudo Shinichi-branded hats, shirts, and accessories. He seemed to be the perfect man.

In reality, the Kudo-kun I knew could be remarkably petty and obsessive. If you showed up in front of him with something green stuck in your teeth, he would not rest until he found out what kind of tea you'd had, where you got it from, how much you paid for it, and whether it was any good. Nevertheless, he was one of the best private detectives in all of Japan, and one thing he that was true about his popular persona was that he would stop at nothing to save a life. Kudo-kun always said he would rather prevent a crime than solve it after the fact.

Of course, Kudo-kun was not superhuman; even he couldn't get from Tokyo to Nagano in less than ninety minutes. By the time he arrived at Amari-san's doorstep, the butter had melted, but some cake icing was the least of my concerns.

Kudo-kun arrived in a car driven by a woman I didn't know. I hadn't pegged him for an interest in older women—maybe she was around 35?—but anything was possible. Ever since the end of his engagement, Kudo-kun's intentions for dating had been mysterious to me. I thought surely he would get back together with his fiancée, but that hadn't happened yet. He must've messed up badly for her to hold out on him that long.

In spite of that, Kudo-kun seemed to be 100% focused as he stepped out of the car. He looked each way, scanning the area. "Are you all right?"

"As well as I can be after camping out on the steps to my friend's apartment for two hours," I said, getting up. "Who's your girlfriend?"

He rolled his eyes. "I haven't even been here for five seconds!" He gestured toward the lady, who locked up her car and came up the steps. "Inspector Yamato is someone I work with from time to time when I'm in the area," he explained. "I believe you two are already acquainted."

Short hair in a bun, sunglasses—it took me a minute, but I remembered that look. We'd had the fortune to meet one time in Tokyo as she and one of her colleagues had been on the way to hire "Sleeping Kogoro" for a case. I recognized the inspector, but she took off her shades and shot me a quizzical look.

"Kudo-kun and I had a small thing in common," I explained, gesturing waist-high with one hand.

She looked at him, and then at me, and she laughed. "Oh, I see! You know, Shinichi-kun is always a little vague about that. Perhaps one of you could tell me about it sometime?"

If she thought it better to know, I was prepared to explain _if_ she and Kudo-kun could find my colleague. Only then would there be time for talking about the past. The inspector understood, and with the inspector lending her authority (along with some gloves and slippers to avoid contaminating the scene), the three of us entered the breached apartment.

Rather than turn on the lights, the inspector turned on a flashlight, and Kudo-kun did the same. I followed the two of them with just the light on my phone to guide me. In spite of the situation, the apartment still seemed tidy. There were no other obvious signs of foul play.

"Alarm deactivated when you got here, huh?" asked the inspector, who was looking over the panel. "Do you know if she sets it?"

I'd seen her set it many times. I didn't know the code, though.

"You've been here before?" asked Kudo-kun.

"I have," I said, waving my phone's light over the living room floor.

"Often?"

"Maybe ten times. She's a colleague and a friend."

"A 'colleague and a friend,' huh?" he echoed, sounding unconvinced, and on seeing the inspector was still with me, looking over the kitchen, Kudo-kun headed toward Amari-san's bedroom. Normally, I would've objected to a man entering a woman's bedroom alone, but this time, I allowed it. In fact, I couldn't help but crack a smile. From the moment he opened that door, I knew it would be less than five seconds before he realized what he'd walked into.

"M-Miyano! What is this?!" Kudo-kun's voice hit an octave I had no idea he could reach, and I followed the inspector into Amari-san's bedroom to see what the commotion was. Truth be told, I'd never been inside Amari-san's bedroom, but she'd described the contents to me several times, so I had a pretty good idea of what I would find: posters, action figures, plushies, hats, and more—all from the Kudo Shinichi collection.

"Didn't I tell you?" I said from the doorway. "She's your biggest fan in Nagano Prefecture—maybe even in all of Japan."

Kudo-kun stared, wide-eyed, at the collection of paraphernalia in horror and awe. For someone whose adult life had been spent cultivating fame and fortune, he could still be surprisingly uncomfortable with his fans. "Uh, she's not _weird_ about this, is she?" he asked nervously.

Nothing could be further from the truth, I told him. Amari-san was a harmless fan, albeit strangely dedicated to him in ways I would never understand. She was sweet, kind, and bubbly. She couldn't hurt a fly and wouldn't dare touch him without his permission.

Kudo-kun tugged at his coat and swallowed, and he forced a smile to his lips. "Well, once we sort this out, maybe I'll sign an autograph for her."

Amari-san wouldn't be doing much with an autograph if we didn't figure out where she'd gone. Despite being broken into, the apartment was tidy—too tidy—and I couldn't think of any reason Amari-san would be harmed. She was a good student. She didn't have a boyfriend. She was doing well in her research. The only possibility that came to mind was a disgruntled competitor.

"She's perfect, then," Kudo-kun concluded with a smirk. "You're not jealous of her, are you? If you are, we'd have to consider you a suspect."

"You're not funny," I said.

"I'm hilarious," he insisted. "Yui-san, am I not hilarious?"

The inspector sighed, shaking her head, and I could see she was a kindred spirit. "I see he's like this a lot," she remarked. "I don't know whether to be relieved or frightened."

"Frightened," I said, maneuvering around her to check out Amari-san's nightstand. "Definitely frightened."

Amari-san's nightstand drawers were the first clues to what someone must've been after. They were messy and definitely rummaged through, unlike the pristine shelf of Kudo Shinichi dolls or the perfectly folded clothes in her dresser. What does one usually keep in a nightstand? Keys, sticky notes, journals, nighttime reading material? If something had been taken, it wasn't clear what. Kudo-kun agreed it was suspicious, and he decided to turn on the room lights so he could take some pictures.

"Something here!" said the inspector from the washroom.

The inspector had gone rummaging through Amari-san's medicine cabinet and found a bottle of trazodone pills alongside a booklet of past prescriptions. After taking pictures of the original configuration of the supplies, she handed Kudo-kun the bottle of pills and began to flip through the booklet, reading off a list of medications while Kudo-kun jotted them down. When the detective was through, Kudo-kun went to me, already with a theory in mind. "What is Amari-san like?" he asked.

She was enthusiastic and passionate for research. She fawned over his exploits the way someone might speak of a puppy. She was impeccably kind but stringent when it came to behaving fairly. She had some difficulty meeting new people—she could be a little shy—but on the whole, everyone in the lab liked her.

Kudo-kun and Inspector Yamato looked back at the list of medications, and they exchanged a knowing glance. "Does she sleep a lot or a little?" asked the inspector.

She was enthusiastic in attitude, but sometimes she would come in a little sleepy. She'd dismiss it as staying up late reading about her favorite detective or doing work from home. I never thought it was a problem before that moment.

That confirmed their suspicions. Kudo-kun handed over a copy of the list to the inspector, who wanted to know everything about who prescribed the medications and when. While they were busy, I took the opportunity to look something up on my phone:

_Trazodone is an organic compound used as an antidepressant,_ said the article, as well as having secondary effects against insomnia.

I put my phone away and looked around the apartment with new eyes. With the apartment lights turned up, I saw clean carpets and walls with a smooth coat of paint. Going back into the main room, I caught a smudge on the countertop beneath the microwave. It all looked so ordinary.

I looked to Kudo-kun then, but he wasn't looking back at me. I knew right away how intensely he was thinking about this mystery. What had become of Amari-san, and who could've harmed her? His brain was already buzzing with these questions. I could see it all over his face. Though it had been years since I'd seen him regularly work cases, there are some things you just don't forget.


	2. Professor Noto's Laboratory

Based on our search of the premises, Inspector Yamato wasn't ready to say Amari-san had fallen victim of foul play. The toolmarks on the doorknob were suspicious, but given that the alarm had been left off, as well as evidence of Amari-san depression medications, it was possible Amari-san had left on her own and simply didn't want to be contacted. "If this is what my detectives gave me," she said, "I'd have to have a little more before going ahead with a formal case." She tapped a pen against her temple as she thought, and I got the impression the inspector's gut was saying this needed to be a case; all she had to do was find some way to get there. "You said your friend didn't report to your lab today. Would anyone there know about that?"

That was hard to say. It was an academic environment, not a regular job. People could come and go as they pleased. That being said, our lab had live animals, which meant that no one could just disappear for a day without ensuring that the animals were properly cared for. "She could've told someone she'd be gone," I concluded, "and maybe she said something about why. It's late, but some people could still be there, and the logs would show who took over care of her animals today."

The inspector and Kudo-kun nodded, and they agreed to check it out.

* * *

As we rode in the back seats of Inspector Yamato's unmarked car, Kudo-kun was already putting together his theory. His main concern was the alarm system. If someone had disarmed it to break in, why wouldn't they rearm it on their way out? Not rearming it would just arouse suspicion once Amari-san returned.

"Maybe they meant to come back," the inspector suggested. "We've caught them in the middle of their scheme."

Kudo-kun liked that idea, and he suggested, if the police had the resources, for someone to keep an eye on the apartment over the next few days, but the inspector couldn't do much yet. Without an official investigation, the most she could do was instruct the patrol officers in the neighborhood to watch closely. Until she was convinced otherwise, the police's ability to help us would be limited.

Kudo-kun insisted that there was no reason for an intruder to enter the premises unless they obtained something, whether it be only information or something material, but the only obvious items of value were the pills in Amari-san's medicine cabinet and her research data. Kudo-kun had already checked the pills. What remained in the bottle was enough to get her through to the next refill date with a few doses to spare. Her research would be on her laptop, which was either at the lab or in her possession. We hadn't found it in her apartment.

"You think she could've taken it with her?" asked Kudo-kun. "Is the work really so pressing?"

It wasn't, but graduate students make their reputations based on the papers they publish. Amari-san had been writing a draft to submit to a journal, so it didn't surprise me that she might keep working on it at home or during odd hours.

"What is it about?" he asked.

"Amari-san would explain that best," I told him. "We're colleagues, but we don't always work on the same projects."

"And what have you been working on?"

I was developing methods to treat cancer cells in the brain. It was all very experimental. We were only working on rats. We weren't doctors, after all.

"I see," said Kudo-kun, looking at me appraisingly. "You're a responsible scientist and student. Everything by the book now—that's how it is, right?"

I saw the inspector looking at us in the rear-view mirror, and I let Kudo-kun's remark hang in the air.

Our group had a lab on Shinshu's engineering campus in Nagano. It was unusual: most of Shinshu's life sciences and medical research was in Matsumoto, but our advisor was from the Nagano area, and she wanted to be close to home, so she persuaded the regents to give her some space in town. She'd sold it as an opportunity to do collaborative, inter-disciplinary research. To her, the brain was a fascinating and mysterious thing. How much could our colleagues in computer science help us understand cognition through the ideas of machine-learning algorithms? How much could our friends in materials science tell us about the elasticity of grey matter and how that makes us susceptible to concussions? Our advisor had many questions like those, and her clout and record persuaded the university's bureaucracy to appease her.

It was late, and the entrance to our building was restricted; the doors were already locked, only accessible to faculty, staff, and students, but I let the three of us inside. The halls were quiet and empty. Motion sensors activated the overhead lights. I tapped my card on a reader, and the doors to our lab space unlocked, leading first to an arrangement of cubicles. Given the time of night, I expected anyone still around to peer over their cubicle walls, but there was no reaction. We were all alone.

"Wait here," I said, leaving the two of them at the door. "I'll get the log book."

"We can't go with you?" asked Kudo-kun. "Why?"

"I don't want to disturb the animals," I explained. "One person going inside is bad enough. Two or three people just increases the risk and noise." I shot the inspector a look, and she seemed to approve. That got Kudo-kun off my back for the moment, and I headed alone through another set of doors into a dark space.

With just my phone flashlight to guide me, I crept slowly through the live animal lab space, which had been laid out in a loop with cages on the outside and on a central island. Amari-san had several rats for her experiments, and in the quiet of night, I could hear them and the other animals breathing steadily in their sleep. It was better that Kudo-kun and the inspector didn't see any of this. Many people are ambivalent about live animal experiments, and they would not understand what we were trying to do.

I slipped back through the door, closing it as gently as I could, and I opened it on an unoccupied cubicle in front of the main door—a spot we kept open for guest researchers and other visitors. Sure enough, most of the entries had been taken care of by Amari-san, but that day, another colleague of ours, Tanabe-san, had taken care of the usual care and feeding.

"Do you have any contact info for this Tanabe-san?" asked the inspector.

I could send him an email, but who knew if he would respond to it over the weekend? For that matter, it seemed like we were going down a rabbit hole with no guarantee of finding anything of value, but just as the three of us started racking our brains to figure out the next step, there was a beeping noise from the door, and light poured in as the door swung open. In came a short woman with straight dark hair and a scrutinizing glare. "What's all this?" said Professor Noto. "Shiho-kun, I thought you'd gone for the day. What are these people doing in my lab?"

I closed the log book and introduces the professor to the others, and her skepticism turned to a sly smile.

"Hmm, the great Kudo Shinichi in the flesh?" She shook his hand. "One of my students is always talking about your exploits."

Kudo-kun shot me a glance. "Just one, huh?" he remarked. "This Amari-san, I take it?"

"You've heard of her, have you? Yes, Kagura-kun is the only one. Shiho-kun is too shy to talk about you," the professor went on, always prone to saying more than needed to be said. "I guess it's no surprise. If she let slip she knows you, Kagura-kun would never stop hounding her for an autograph! Now, what's all this about?"

We explained the situation with Amari-san, and Professor Noto's amusement faded rapidly. She paced around our desks, puzzled. "It doesn't make sense. She should be home by now. Should've been home hours ago."

"You know where she was today?" asked the inspector.

"I know she had a medical appointment," said the professor. "Kagura-kun has some particular health problems."

"We recovered a bottle of trazodone in her medicine cabinet earlier," said Kudo-kun. "It's an antidepressant."

The professor nodded, not surprised. "I'm aware of her mental health history."

"Amari-san told you directly what kind of doctor she was seeing?" asked Kudo-kun, who nodded at me. "Miyano didn't seem to know about it."

"I make it my business to know my students," the professor explained. "When Kagura-kun approached me to ask for a position in my lab, we talked about her health and how it would affect her research."

"You thought about refusing her?" asked the inspector. "About discriminating against her due to her mental health?"

"I thought about what she would need to be successful; I never considered turning her down for that," said the professor. "I knew from her record she had great potential."

"You know a good deal about every prospective student, huh," said Kudo-kun, echoing her. His eyes went to me, then back to the professor.

"Yes, I do," the professor reiterated.

"I see. Do you think there's any danger that someone could've been after Amari-san due to her work?"

The professor shook her head. "Not her work, no. Her work has no unusual commercial or scientific value. It certainly could be useful, if it pans out."

"What exactly do you all do here?" he asked. "I've seen some posters, but they're a bit high level."

"You don't know?" asked the professor. She shot me a look and smirked. "Perhaps Shiho-kun should explain it to you."

I sighed, and I explained it simply. Professor Noto's group specialized in neuroscience, particularly diseases and structural damage to the brain. Amari-san was working on some research in behavioral changes in animals due to overstimulation or physical damage to certain areas of the brain, as well as how the brain recovers from damage from various sources, such as physical trauma vs. chemical or biological causes. As the professor said, it was good and useful work, but it had no exceptional commercial value, and as a second-year graduate student, Amari-san was only beginning on her research career. Her work wasn't breaking a lot of new ground. It was very narrow, and I doubted that anyone would try to steal her research for a paper. It simply wouldn't have been worth the trouble.

Kudo-kun and the inspector conferred for a few moments. With the inspector's permission, Kudo-kun asked if they could inspect Amari-san's desk for clues. The professor agreed, provided that she and I kept an eye on them to make sure no research data was improperly disclosed. I pointed the way to Amari-san's cubicle (though with the posters of Kudo-kun on its walls, it would've been hard to miss), but while the detectives went that way, I took the professor aside.

"Convenient that you're working late, Professor," I said.

"This isn't late for me," she remarked. "Your friend, the Kudo boy—you're afraid of him, aren't you? You haven't told him about our work."

"Some people like to pry into everything," I said. "It's better to exercise discretion."

"I'm not worried about discretion," Professor Noto said coolly. "Discipline and discretion are second-nature to me now."

"So 'discretion' is why you never told me about Amari-san's doctor," I concluded.

"And I never told her about your background, either." She kept her eyes steady on the detectives. "That's only fair, don't you think?"

Amari-san's cubicle was in a back corner. There was one notebook in plain view on her desk. The inspector handled it with gloves and flipped through it but found nothing recent worth mentioning. Aside from that and the computer, the only items visible were some pens, an empty thermos, a poster of Kudo Shinichi on the cubicle wall, and a baseball cap with the initials _KS_ on the front and the words _Only One Truth_ superimposed over them. Amari-san liked to wear that hat when she was thinking deeply about something.

With the back end of a pen, Kudo-kun tapped the keyboard. The monitor lit up, and the screen asked for a password.

"University policy forbids me and anyone I direct to break into a student's assigned computer or data," said the professor. "Inspector, I'm sure you have the same kinds of restrictions, as an officer of the law."

"Something like that," said the inspector.

The professor nodded. "Let me go through my emails and see if Kagura-kun mentioned anything about it. I'm sure Shiho-kun and Detective Kudo can keep looking here."

The inspector understood, and she and the professor went outside to leave us alone. Once they were out of earshot, Kudo-kun sat down in Amari-san's chair. "You don't happen to know—"

I took the keyboard from him and typed in the password, _Kudo382cool!_.

"Your friend has good taste," he commented.

"If she knew how full of yourself you are, she'd think twice about that," I told him. Besides, just because I could get into her university-owned computer didn't mean that we'd find very much. Amari-san kept a laptop with her for remote access and research. If she were smart, the most personal aspects of her life were kept there. Still, Kudo-kun found a lot on Amari-san's work computer. Foolishly, she'd opened her personal email on that machine, and Kudo-kun uncovered an appointment reminder from the offices of Hayami Eita, a psychiatrist in Nakano, just south of Amari-san's hometown.

There were also personal messages from me that I insisted he refrain from reading, but his curiosity got the better of him. He called my messages about the party the next day _business-like_ and _stiff_. "Are you sure she's a friend of yours?" he asked.

I had thought so. As much as I'd listened to her stories about the great Kudo Shinichi and his escapades, I'd thought we were close—as close I can be to a person.

He frowned. "But you didn't know about the trazodone."

I hadn't known—not about the trazodone, not about her psychiatrist. If I had, perhaps I would've taken the matter more seriously. One has to think that, if a person on mental health medication goes out of contact or disappears, she could be suffering a bad reaction. She could be thinking of harming herself.

"Relax," he said with an assured smile. "It's a little early for that kind of thinking. We'll get to the bottom of this."

Aha, there it was—that million-watt smile that tries to announce to the world that Kudo Shinichi is here and on the case! If he hadn't been rummaging through Amari-san's hard drive, I might've felt reassured. Instead, I had to keep a close eye on him to make sure he didn't inadvertently delete some of Amari-san's research data.

Kudo-kun took down some notes about other websites Amari-san had visited. She'd been chatting with some fans on a forum for mystery buffs and detective groupies. Perhaps one of those people had turned a friendship with her into an unhealthy obsession—or maybe they would know something that Professor Noto and I did not.

On our way out of the office space, Kudo-kun stopped at the next cubicle—mine. He looked for a long time at the photo on the right side of my desk—the one of my sister and me. "That's nice," he said, his voice quiet. He took another look around and saw a small poster of Higo Ryusuke, the soccer player from Big Osaka, on the divider between my cubicle and the next. "Well, well, someone might take a look at this and think you're a soccer fan," he said, laughing to himself. "So your friend Amari-san is a fan of mine, and you're a fan of that guy. Do you two argue over who's the better man?"

"Why should I argue about something that's obvious?" I said. "Higo-san is gentle and compassionate. You just violated every facet of Amari-san's privacy in under fifteen minutes."

"You watched me do it; you gave me the password!"

"That doesn't mean I like what I saw."

He hissed, shaking his head, and he looked over my desk one more time. "No other photos, huh? You like your privacy, don't you? Here, you're just Miyano Shiho, an ordinary graduate student. Is that right?"

If you asked Amari-san, that's exactly what she would say about me.


	3. Home

Though Kudo-kun couldn't share what he'd found from Amari-san's emails with the inspector, they did lead him to believe that her doctor could help us find answers. Kudo-kun pushed the inspector to help locate the doctor and question him about Amari-san's visit, and she offered to help arrange a meeting in the morning. I wasn't happy about that, but the inspector assured us it was the best she could do. It was getting late, none of us had eaten, and Kudo-kun needed to find a place to stay. He wasn't about to leave Nagano City just yet. The three of us said our goodbyes, and I headed home.

Home was a small apartment about fifteen minutes' walk from the engineering campus. It wasn't the most convenient place, but I'd picked it out because it had a dark, wooden decor that I felt was natural and earthen. That's the kind of thing that an ordinary graduate student should care about.

Once I stepped past the threshold, I realized how worn down I was. My footsteps thudded on the steps like jackhammers. Kudo-kun in Nagano, Amari-san missing—what a day it had been. I had a half-dozen messages from friends and family back home bugging me for information. My friend was missing? Kudo-kun was already in town and investigating? Yes and yes. They wanted details, but I was sure they'd hear all about it. I put my bag in the closet, left my phone on the nightstand, and lay down. The only thing more tiring than worrying about a missing friend was having Kudo-kun sniffing around. It was a necessary sacrifice but no less stressful, and it was fitting in a way: his overconfident face was the reason Amari-san and I became friends in the first place.

I'd been working with Professor Noto for three years when Amari-san joined the group. It was a coincidence that the cubicle next to mine was available. Since I'd already been in the lab for some time, Professor Noto thought to have me watch over her for the first few weeks and answer any questions she had. At first, I'd thought she was polite and shy. She spoke very formally in front of me, playing the role of a model student showing respect for a senior member of the group, but she didn't waste any time decorating her cubicle. She put up that poster of Kudo-kun on her wall, and when I stopped by later that day and noticed it, she seemed surprised.

"Shiho-senpai," she said, "is it okay? I'm sorry. I should've asked. I can take it down—"

I wouldn't let her. It was her cubicle. She deserved to have what she liked there, if it made her feel at-home and productive. If that meant a poster of some handsome young man to look at, I wasn't going to stop her.

"Oh, he's not just a pretty face," she said. "Do you know who he is?"

I said I didn't.

"It's Kudo Shinichi, the detective! They call him the _Heisei Holmes_, you know! He's brilliant. You heard about the Pandora heist last year, didn't you? He helped crack that case. He's really something else.''

I stared at her, and Amari-san seemed embarrassed with her outburst. She sank in her chair, apologizing for how loud she'd been, and she thanked me for checking in on her, but I wasn't done with her yet. I pulled my chair around the divider and asked her all about Kudo Shinichi, this detective she admired so much. Over the course of that afternoon, her wary and bashful eyes turned sparkling as she recounted all of Kudo-kun's exploits over the previous year. He was, in her opinion, the cool hand of justice, full of righteous anger only when the situation called for it.

I wasn't about to share in Amari-san's Kudo Shinichi obsession, but she'd seemed grateful to have someone to talk to about it and who wouldn't judge her for her fascination with him. How could I? I knew what it was like to be a fan of someone and to admire him from afar. People of Amari-san's passion are few and far between in society. I'd enjoyed meeting her, and the thought that something foul might have befallen her—it didn't seem right or just. Even just the day before, I'd been talking with her about baking something for the party that weekend. She hadn't known much about cooking when she'd arrived at Shinshu, but I'd tutored her in some things, and she'd been getting better.

"Don't forget the hazelnuts," I'd written to her.

"You worry too much," was her reply. "It'll be fine." And she sent me one of those stickers with a saluting duck, which said, _Count on me!_

_Count on me!_—and then nothing. No response to my subsequent messages, not even a hint that they'd been read.

I was still staring at that message when there was a knock on my door. I didn't expect visitors, and I felt fearful of standing on the other side of the door to look through a peephole. The kitchen had an exterior window, so I peered through a gap in the curtains.

It was Kudo-kun.

"Come on, I know you're in there!" he called out. "Open up! Food's getting cold!"

He was carrying some containers, and I realized that I hadn't eaten anything since lunch. It was a bad idea to allow a strange man in my apartment just because he had food, but under the circumstances, I didn't want to take the time to make dinner anyway. I opened the door.

"About time!" he said, showing himself inside. "Got your favorite."

Kudo Shinichi, the insatiable detective, had found time not just to shack up at the Hotel Metropolitan but to ask Professor Noto about my favorite restaurant in town, stop by said restaurant, chat up the bartender (a wonderful American named _Albert_), and order my favorite dish. After all that, I didn't even want to know how he found out my address!

"I should've eaten already, you know," I told him.

"I figured it would cheer you up either way."

Well, he wasn't entirely wrong. The falafels from Johnny Christo's had gotten me through a terrible second-term organic chemistry course. I used to say that those falafels could tell me more about esters and glycerides than the instructor for that course could.

Kudo-kun made himself at home. He kicked off his shoes, not even bothering to put them away neatly. He stole some slippers without asking. He didn't get three steps into my apartment without yanking his tie loose. I thought the formal look didn't suit him. Wouldn't he be happier looking like a messy, idiosyncratic genius than someone so starchy and conventional? He was surely smart enough to solve a case in barefoot and in a bathrobe.

"Don't be stupid," he said, separating his food from mine. He'd ordered a falafel, too. "I can absolutely solve a case barefoot and in a bathrobe. That doesn't mean I would just go around doing that! Do you really think I'm such a weirdo?"

Did he want the honest answer?

"You're terrible," he said. He took a bite of his falafel and cringed. "I don't understand why you like this."

You can put a great detective into a fancy suit, but that doesn't make him into a man of culture. "You'd learn to like it if you took the time to savor it instead of attacking your food like a dog," I told him.

"Is that gonna help me solve the case?"

You see what I mean? I told him there was more to life than solving cases, and he shot me a sour look.

"Are you gonna lecture me all night, or are you gonna eat?" he said.

I sighed, and I took my falafel to eat. Kudo-kun had been tactless to ask around about my favorite restaurants, but I let it go. Even though we were eating from take-out boxes, sharing falafels reminded me of lunches with Amari-san and our colleagues—of worrying about neurotic journal reviewers and university bureaucrats. Those aren't pleasant worries, but compared to what troubled me that night, they seemed simpler—perhaps even preferable.

Kudo-kun sensed what was on my mind. "You're worrying," he observed. "Just relax and eat."

I took a bite, but I was _not_ going to just relax and eat. "Did you find something out?" I asked.

He sighed. He must've known I would ask eventually because he seemed to be dreading it. Yes, he had found something. It had taken some persuading, but Inspector Yamato had taken a look through some police files to see if Amari-san's name brought up any threats of violence against her. The problem was that, before high school, Amari Kagura didn't seem to exist. Before that point, her family name was _Ohara_–not the result of her mother marrying another man or any of the other typical reasons. Instead, after her father had died, Amari-san had her name changed to her mother's family name.

I asked Kudo-kun if he had any idea why Amari-san and her mother had changed their names, why they had effectively cut themselves off from the husband's family. He was unusually awkward about the topic, but I prodded him for answers. The reason, he explained to me, shed light on why Amari-san might have needed a psychiatrist.

"One day in the summer of Amari-san's third year of middle school, Amari-san's father attacked her mother with a shovel," he said.

Apparently Ohara-san, the father, had been become abusive toward mother and daughter over the course of a year. Though he'd had no prior history of violence, the incidents had escalated to life-threatening levels. The final incident, the one that ended the marriage, started over Ohara-san growing jealous of the attention his wife paid to their garden. "She touches those flowers more lovingly than she ever touched me," he had said, according to one of his coworkers. When she came inside to prepare lunch, he took one of her garden trowels, apparently believing that it would be fitting to abuse her with the one of the tools she used to get away from him. The two brawled in the kitchen while young Amari-san hid upstairs in her room, having heard that kind of commotion too many times before. It only ended when Amari-san's mother stabbed her husband with a pair of handheld shears.

To think that Amari-san had survived a violent childhood—I'd never suspected. She was enthusiastic for her work. She'd seemed well-adjusted and friendly. She wasn't a loner. She wasn't the kind of person who would eat lunch alone habitually and become isolated from others. She didn't seem like she had this pressing weight hanging over her, threatening to snuff out any semblance of a normal life.

She hid it very well. Maybe she hid it so well because she hid it through openness. She was the type of person who appeared not to have secrets of any consequence. She would gush freely about Kudo Shinichi the great detective and how she adored him. Someone who shares something so embarrassing and personal couldn't possibly have more to hide—or so I had thought.

I admitted to Kudo-kun I was having trouble reconciling this story with the Amari-san I knew, or with the appearances she'd kept up. He wasn't surprised. "Normal people are killers sometimes, and you'd never know it just by being around them every day, by eating with them, or by talking with them," he argued. "Figuring out who actually has that within them—that's hard. Maybe I make it look easy sometimes, but it's not. Look at you, for instance."

I stiffened. Just what was he implying?

"Okay, that's not what I meant," he said, embarrassed. "You're not a cold-blooded killer, but take a look around. This place is cozy and natural, right? You chose that on purpose, didn't you? It's peaceful. Everything seems to be in its place. I have no doubt you put everything in here deliberately, right down to the sharp blue tone of the curtains. It's very personalized, but it's not _personal_, you know? If I were to look around here and try to infer something about you, I'd get the feeling that you're an orderly and meticulous person, but there are things about you that you don't want other people knowing just by looking around."

I thought he was cheating a little, considering that it wasn't like he was just meeting me for the first time in my apartment. He'd already formed an opinion about what kind of person I was. His conclusions didn't mean anything.

"You go back home three times a year," he went on, waving his falafel around dangerously. "You have friends back home, but none of them know about Amari-san. Maybe you've talked about her in general terms, but not by name. And Amari-san doesn't know anything about your life back home, does she?"

"So what if I want to keep some things separate from others?" I said. "Some things are difficult to explain."

"You're being silly."

And he wasn't? I didn't see him rushing to tell the world about his personal life. His silence hadn't helped anyone. When you're the subject of a very public breakup, it's not enough to tell people that things just "didn't work out" or that you'd "remain good friends." He'd had a nice thing going with his fiancée. Everyone in the world thought so. Friends since childhood turned lovers—it was the sort of thing that sold comics and trashy romance novels by the truckload, yet all that anyone knew about it was that one day he was engaged, and the next day he wasn't. That was that.

Well, anyone with a brain could tell that that _was not_ that. People who are 100% okay with their failed relationships don't dwell on them, but Kudo-kun still wore half of a matching set of bracelets—a loop of white jade that he kept on his right wrist. I hadn't seen his fiancée wearing that since the breakup, but there it was on his wrist as he finished scarfing down his falafel and started putting the take-out containers away.

"You're in no position to lecture me about being private," I said, "considering you still wear that bracelet on your wrist."

Kudo-kun looked back at me with an irritated expression. I stared, not backing down, and he scratched the back of his head as he looked away. "Some things are difficult to explain," he concluded.

Dinner was over, and Kudo-kun, not one to leave a case unfinished, would retire to the Metropolitan for the night. He would do some more reading about Amari-san's father and her doctor, and in the morning, he planned to go to Nakano and track down the clinic. He suggested taking the train around 9:30 the next morning, and I said I would be there.

"Oh, you're looking to play detective now?" he said, grinning. "I didn't think you were into that anymore."

I would do whatever it took to find Amari-san. There was no other meaning to it, no matter what he was implying.

"Like I don't know that," he responded, rolling his eyes. "You're not a very good host, you know—not charming at all!"

"I'm not charming to uninvited guests, no," I said.

"I brought you food!"

"You brought an excuse to barge in here like a bull in a china shop, and I naïvely opened the door."

Kudo-kun looked back at me through narrowed eyes, as if I'd told some joke that wasn't funny. I reminded him that the trains would become more infrequent the longer he stayed, and he remembered that if he was going to be in town for the night, he'd need some clothes, a toothbrush, and who knew what else, so he actually had a lot to do. I couldn't help him with the clothes, but I saved him some time by giving him a new toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste that I had on-hand. He seemed relieved; usually if he went traveling he kept some bare essentials around for a case just like this one, but he'd rushed to Nagano so quickly he'd left all that behind.

"Were you so eager to get out of Tokyo?" I said. "Nagano is a fine tourist spot, but it's not nearly as nice as the mountains."

"Yeah, I came here for a vacation," he said, rolling his eyes again. As he put his shoes back on, he stretched his arms, and just as he was working out the kinks in his body, he put on a serious expression, staring aside. "I'll see you at the station?" he asked, his thoughts settled.

"Yes, yes, I'll be there," I said.

"Good. And take care of yourself. You looked like you were half-dead when you answered the door."

"What exactly is that supposed to mean?" I growled.

"Okay, never mind, never mind! Sheesh." He couldn't get out the door fast enough. "Night."

I said _good night_ too, but I left the door open for a bit, and Kudo-kun looked me expectantly.

"Thanks," I said, "for the food, and for coming here for Amari-san."

He smiled. "Of course," he said, and with a nod, he headed down the exterior walkway to the stairs.

Kudo-kun had done me a favor with the food, but he'd left hurriedly and without cleaning up. I took the time to put away the takeout containers and restore order to the mess he'd made on my table. I took a rag to the table's surface and thought briefly about what he had said—about my apartment seeming _personalized_ but not _personal_. It's true I'd anticipated that my colleagues and coworkers might stop by from time to time. That's why I kept another photo of my sister and my parents beside my bookshelf. Kudo-kun hadn't seen into my room, but in there was a poster of Higo Ryusuke, the soccer player. He was someone else I could talk about openly. In the end, there are things we can talk about with others—things that are personal but not too invasive. I had a family, and there was a celebrity or two I found entertaining. Who doesn't?

When the table was clean, I wondered if Amari-san would ever sit with me there, if she would agree with Kudo-kun that my apartment was personalized but not personal, and if she would tell me why she'd kept the incident with her father hidden from me. After giving it some thought, I came to believe that Amari-san's answer wouldn't be too different from Kudo-kun's or mine:

_Some things are difficult to explain._


	4. On the Trail of Amari

There was only one mental health clinic in the northern suburbs of Nagano City: the Nishimaru Clinic in Nakano, about twenty kilometers from downtown. Amari-san was from Iiyama, another four or five kilometers to the north. Since there were many doctors in Nagano proper, Kudo-kun and I reasoned that Amari-san had needed a doctor while she was still in school, and the Nishimaru Clinic was the most convenient and accessible.

Only the two of us—Kudo-kun and I—went to investigate the clinic. Inspector Yamato couldn't afford to spend anymore time on the case without more evidence that Amari-san wasn't alive and well. Though the inspector urged Kudo-kun to call if anything changed, we were on our own.

As famous as he'd become, Kudo-kun was still just a young man in an overpriced suit to some people. The receptionist at the clinic didn't recognize him, and though the inspector had called to put in a good word, the idea of a private detective snooping about their patients didn't put the receptionist at ease. "We can't confirm or deny anyone is a patient here," the receptionist insisted. Kudo-kun leaned with both hands on the reception counter and rattled off everything we knew about Amari-san and her relationship with Doctor Hayami. He produced photos of Amari-san's booklet of prescriptions. The receptionist promised to pass all that along to the doctor, but he "wouldn't make any promises."

Until Doctor Hayami had a chance to review our request, Kudo-kun and I waited. Kudo-kun was restless. He flipped through a stack of magazines, never looking at one for more than a minute at a time. "Archaic, aren't they?" he said, counting how many magazines there were to pass the time, but I didn't think so. Everything in this world has some inertia to it. It might've been true that magazines were dying, but they weren't archaic until they were completely dead and gone. Besides, he would've been happier in those days. There was once a time when detective stories were all the rage in weekly magazines. If he'd lived in those days, he probably would've had every good mystery magazine delivered to his doorstep, devouring them every week when he couldn't get enough of his cases.

I said as much, and Kudo-kun thought for a moment, handed me a fashion magazine, and started going through his case files for Amari-san. "You're probably right about that," he said. I meant to ask Kudo-kun about it, but one of of the clinic staff came to get us. Doctor Hayami was ready to talk.

The doctor's office was larger than I expected. It had a desk, a sofa, a traditional table, and a mixture of chairs, each with a different shape and set of materials. The doctor explained that he liked to offer his patients the choice of where to sit. "It gives them ownership and control over the situation," he said. Doctor Hayami offered us the choice, and we decided to sit on the sofa. Doctor Hayami took an armchair.

Doctor Hayami already knew who we were. He'd already spoken with Amari-san at length about Kudo Shinichi and her obsession with him. "It was totally healthy," he clarified, trying to put Kudo-kun at ease. "She's just a devoted fan, nothing more than that." He thought it was funny, but also sad, that Kudo-kun had come to investigate Amari-san's disappearance. As for me, Amari-san had spoken of me occasionally. The doctor said she thought very highly of me.

Kudo-kun got right to business. "We know Amari-san had an appointment with you yesterday. What can you tell us about it?"

The doctor recalled that Amari-san's appointment had been set for one o'clock. He couldn't say exactly when she arrived. His staff would've been the first to see her, and they probably asked her to fill out some documents updating her medical history and so on. She was ready promptly at one, so he thought she had to have been there for some time—at least fifteen or twenty minutes—to have finished the paperwork by then.

Doctor Hayami wouldn't say much about the specifics of the appointment. Without breaking privilege, he remembered offering Amari-san some snacks—something he did with most patients—but she didn't eat. He got the impression she'd already eaten and had expected that. Amari-san usually scheduled her appointments for the early afternoon, so he thought that she might get lunch as a matter of course before seeing him. Without discussing the specifics of their session, he thought Amari-san to be healthy. She was in a good state of mind when he saw her. She was not, in any way, a danger to herself or others.

"You must've known her a long time, to say that," said Kudo-kun.

The doctor frowned at that. "She's been a patient for some time. I won't go into any more specifics than that."

Kudo-kun jotted that down. "You know I have Amari-san's prescription booklet, so I'm aware when you first started prescribing her medications. Did something happen in her life to make her suddenly need a psychiatrist in middle school?"

The doctor refused to discuss it, but if we wanted to snoop around some more, he recommended that we contact Amari-san's mother. We didn't know how to get in touch with her, but he promised to pass along her information if she approved of it.

"What about her father?" asked Kudo-kun. "Is he in the picture? Did he run off with another woman?"

He wasn't in the picture, as far as the doctor knew.

"Did he leave the picture before or after Amari-san started seeing you?" asked Kudo-kun.

The doctor looked back steadily. "I can't say."

Kudo-kun jotted that down and continued to ask about Amari-san's father and the father's family. Were they supportive of Amari-san? Yes, as far as Doctor Hayami knew. The two sides had had a falling out initially. Amari-san's mother still didn't get along with them, but the daughter was a different story. He didn't think they would wish Amari-san harm. He didn't believe that Amari-san had serious enemies.

"You're close enough to her to know that?" asked Kudo-kun.

"She's never given me any indication that she was fearful or anxious about someone to the point they might physically harm her," the doctor explained. "She's concerned with other people's feelings and accommodating of them. If anyone would want to harm her, I don't think it would be for personal reasons. Professional ones? Maybe."

Kudo-kun wrapped up his interrogation of the doctor with a question about the end of Amari-san's session. Doctor Hayami told us that Amari-san left around 2:30. With nothing else to ask, Kudo-kun offered me a chance to pose questions, but I didn't think there would be any point. Instead, Doctor Hayami volunteered one more thing: on Amari-san's behalf he apologized that she had concealed her medical history from me. "Kagura-chan's been through a lot, and there are very few people who know about it. I'm sure she trusts you a great deal even though she was unsure how to talk about this. I know that may be hard to understand, but…" He couldn't find the words to finish, but I nodded like I understood, and he seemed satisfied with that.

On our way out of the clinic, Kudo-kun asked me what I thought of the doctor. I told him I hadn't planned on questioning the doctor like a suspect, but Kudo-kun insisted that one should assume everyone is a suspect until they can be ruled out.

"Ah, so I'm a suspect, too, then?" I asked.

He rolled his eyes and scoffed. "Please."

I just felt that Kudo-kun's suspicions toward the doctor were strange and unsettling. He'd pretended to be much more ignorant of the situation than he really was—asking questions he already knew the answers to, just to see if the doctor would lie. It was paranoid, and I told him so.

"Yeah, sometimes as a detective you have to be a little suspicious of people," he said as casually as one talks about children running on a playground or the nesting habits of birds. "Don't tell me you can't see it. You're a sharp one. You have a knack for it."

I did _not_ have a knack for detective work, but if I had think suspiciously about Doctor Hayami, I could come up with a few reasons why he might lie to us. A doctor and a patient tend to have a close relationship, especially when it comes to emotional problems and trauma. It was possible Doctor Hayami had coerced Amari-san into something unethical, or he might've allowed her to develop feelings for him in a way that only someone vulnerable might do. He had the ability to hide behind professional ethics to excuse his silence on various questions. Alternatively, perhaps Doctor Hayami had exaggerated how well Amari-san's family was getting along with her father's side. He might know that they had some longstanding grudge against Amari-san. Maybe he had been persuaded to work for them, or he might have felt that allowing us to interfere would only make things worse.

I told Kudo-kun about these ideas, not thinking they were worth much. Kudo-kun actually thought that the first was plausible. "You see?" he said. "Knack for it. You're naturally suspicious of people."

He said that like I should take pride in it.

* * *

Doctor Hayami gave us some contact information for Amari-san's mother, but by the time we reached her workplace—a local high school—she'd already left for the day. The doctor had led slip that Amari-san was missing, and within minutes, Amari-sensei had gone home and called the police. By the time Kudo-kun and I arrived, Inspector Yamato was there, and she'd brought some junior detectives with her. "Seems you _are_ on to something," said the inspector, not at all surprised with this turn of events.

Amari-sensei told the police she'd last seen her daughter at a cafe near the high school. They'd had a late lunch; Amari-san was late that morning, complaining about a backup on the train, so it was probable that Amari-san had come directly from the train to the cafe. The inspector asked if Amari-sensei had been angry or upset because her daughter was late. Amari-sensei had been irritated, yes, because she only had so much time for her lunch break. School schedules aren't flexible.

"But do you generally have a good relationship with your daughter?" the inspector asked.

Amari-sensei took offense to the question. "We're family," she said. "Of course we have a good relationship! Just what are you implying, Inspector?"

Kudo-kun tried to smooth things over, saying that it's better to know these things in advance and not be surprised than to suspect that Amari-sensei misled us. Unfortunately, Kudo-kun wasn't half as good at persuading a distraught mother as he was at being a detective. Amari-sensei didn't take the suggestion that she might be lying to police well, wondering if she should ask us to get off her property and find her daughter instead of wasting precious time. Multiple detectives tried to calm her down, but she started talking about calling up her husband's relatives to see if they'd heard from her daughter or were keeping something from her. The police thought that was a terrible idea; if nothing else, it could tip off potential perpetrators about the investigation.

Kudo-kun saw that the police were getting nowhere, so he asked me to step in. I knew Amari-san, after all. Her mother might listen to me.

I asked him since when I was his assistant, and he just shot a look back at me like he knew he couldn't answer that well, so I settled for something else. "Buy me a handbag," I said.

"This is your friend we're talking about!" he complained, so I amended the offer: buy Amari-san a handbag, too, when we found her. "Fine," he said, and he made it known through Inspector Yamato that I was going to take a turn with Amari-sensei. The mother was typing up a message on her phone when I approached her. I introduced myself, and my name got her attention. She knew who I was, at least through her daughter. I told her I'd found Amari-san's apartment broken into, but when she asked for a description of the scene, I caught a glimpse of Kudo-kun in the corner of my eye, shaking his head. I couldn't tell a potential suspect what we'd learned. All I could say was that it looked like Amari-san hadn't been home and wasn't attacked there.

Amari-sensei seemed calmed by that thought, and she realized that we were being watched. She walked me into the kitchen area—the same kitchen where Amari-san's father had been stabbed and laid face-down as he died.

Amari-sensei offered me some tea. I allowed her to pour it, but I didn't drink. She had questions, and I couldn't drink much if I was answering them anyway. What kind of friend was I to her daughter? How long had we known each other? What was I doing going over to her apartment on a weeknight? As I answered these questions, I got the sense that, while Amari-sensei claimed she was on good terms with her daughter, she didn't know that much about Amari-san's personal life. Maybe that was natural, but I wasn't sure. Amari-san had never struck me as someone with much to hide, but she'd hidden some things from me, and it made sense that she wouldn't go into detail talking about her life at Shinshu.

Having calmed down once she understood more of the situation, Amari-sensei was ready to take my questions. "Does Amari-san see her therapist because of your husband?"

Amari-sensei put her teacup down and composed herself. "Did Kagura tell you about him?"

I admitted she hadn't. We'd learned only through some digging.

Amari-sensei nodded. "She was upstairs when it happened. She heard the whole thing. It's not something a child should be involved in."

"The name _Amari_ is your family's name, not your husband's, isn't it? Do you and your daughter get along with your husband's family?"

"I don't, but Kagura does," Sensei said. "I don't think they would hurt her, but they still try to pit her against me. They even try to get her to change her name back. It's not happening, but she does talk to them."

"Why don't you get along with them?" I asked.

"I killed their boy. Do you think they're about to forget about that?"

Did that mean they would try to hurt her by hurting her daughter? Not in her opinion, no, and she became exasperated with the question.

"Miyano-san," she said, "I'm glad you're Kagura's friend and that you're helping look for her, but why don't you focus on why she disappeared and not ancient history?"

It wasn't clear to me that it was ancient history. Her husband's death was the reason Amari-san was nearby. How many other people even knew she would have an appointment? I hadn't. Only Professor Noto, Amari-sensei, Doctor Hayami and his staff. Did Amari-sensei's in-laws know about it?

"They would," she admitted quietly, seeming to realize what I was getting at.

Aside from the logic of the situation, I disagreed with the idea that it was ancient history. It wasn't. Amari-san had kept her appointment from me. I considered her a close friend, but it was still something she felt she had to keep secret. I wouldn't have been surprised if no one else in the lab knew. It was still something that affected her every day.

"You shouldn't take it personally," Amari-sensei said. "It's not something you just tell people out of the blue. I don't talk about it even with my friends. They haven't been through something like that; they can't know what it's like. It's impossible for them."

It was something difficult to explain.

I asked about why Amari-sensei was so sure her daughter was on good terms with her in-laws' family; she admitted it was unexpected, but she had no ill will toward them before. As long as they didn't drive a wedge between her and her daughter, she didn't have a problem with them. Despite what her father had done, Amari-san still paid her respects often. As far as Amari-sensei knew, her daughter had planned to visit the grave the day before. Usually she did it in the morning, but since Amari-san had been running late, it was possible she didn't make it until after her appointment with Doctor Hayami—in the afternoon.

* * *

I had a bad feeling already when it became clear Amari-san hadn't been seen since visiting the cemetery. I think it's unwise to be unduly sentimental about the dead. Keep them in your heart, sure, but it's all too easy for the living to use the dead against you, to be overcome with emotion when you should be vigilant for threats.

At the cemetery, the ground was still soft from a morning dew and rain the previous day. At the grave of Ohara Itsuki, a bouquet of purple hyacinths had been soaked through. The grave was near a corner of the cemetery, with access to some adjacent woods. It was there, at the foot of a tree, that we found Amari-san's wallet, soaked through and dried again, so that the material was warped and deformed. A business card inside bled ink. Two sets of footprints were intermingled around the tree, leaving impressions in the soft soil and grass.

As Inspector Yamato called for additional detectives to examine the scene, search for the florist, and canvass the area for potential witnesses, Kudo-kun stood by my side. "It's going to be okay," he tried to assure me. "We know she was taken here. We'll find her."

He meant it as comfort, but he was horrifically bad at it. The last thing I needed was the thought of someone close to me dying and having her face plastered on the front page. This certainty was far from a comfort. It was a recurring nightmare.

"Oi, Haibara."

I jolted, and I shot a glance past him at the inspector and her detectives, but no one was looking our way. I relaxed, and I brushed his hand off my shoulder. "You'll make sure of that—is that what you're saying?" I remarked.

Kudo-kun smirked, assured and confident. "Yeah," he said.

And I may have smiled a little. After all, that determination of his, backed up by a promise that the truth would come out, was too familiar to me. It was something else I couldn't forget.


	5. The Search

All throughout the previous day, I'd believed that Amari-san was missing, but finding her wallet at the graveyard changed things. Now we _knew_ she was missing, and all my vain hopes that she'd just decided to disappear for a little while were dashed. I'd held on to that hope even after finding her apartment broken into. I'd worried that we were learning too much about her personal life and the death of her father, that everything I'd done to invade her privacy had been for nothing, but that wasn't so. Amari-san was missing. She'd left a bouquet of purple hyacinths at her father's grave, and when she was done talking with his spirit, someone abducted her. That was what happened—as best we could tell.

Now that we had some hard evidence of foul play, the police came out in force. They brought in an army of uniformed and plainclothes officers to scour the graveyard for clues. They canvassed the area for witnesses and surveillance footage. They knew that every second counted, and they'd already thrown away a whole day.

There's no more helpless feeling than knowing someone close to you is in danger and you can't help them. It's like a disease, coursing through the body and infecting every last extremity. You feel cold even though your heart beats fast. It's hard to sit still. You might become obsessed with clocks, with watching time ticking away and wondering if that person had been alive the previous minute and only died just now. It's a feeling you never get used to.

After making another pass through the graveyard for evidence, I sat down on a bench by the road and watched the time tick away. If only Amari-san would come walking down the street wondering innocently what all the commotion was—that would've been nice, but it wasn't going to happen. The police were busy, so I waited alone, but after a time, Kudo-kun hunted me down. Naturally, all he wanted to talk about was what he and the police had found. According to him, there were at least two sets of footprints, but the soft soil had made it difficult to determine the owners' genders, shoe sizes, or weight. Officers had identified two promising surveillance cameras that might have recorded the attack, and they'd found a tag on the bouquet and were trying to track down the flower shop. That was what they had found so far.

"Am I supposed to do something about all that?" I asked.

"Maybe not," he admitted, "but don't let your mind wander in a time like this. Trust me; it helps."

"So this is your idea of how to cheer someone up: bombard her with facts and evidence until her mind can hold nothing else!"

He made a petulant face. "It sounds stupid when you put it that way."

"Because it _is_ stupid," I said. "I hope you don't make a habit of talking like that these days."

"Come on," he said crossly, but I wasn't going to apologize. I liked him better this way. His performative persona—the starchy, all-knowing, nosy detective—was fine to watch on TV but terrible to deal with in real-life. The version of Kudo Shinichi who chafed at my remarks was easier to deal with: a little childish, and clumsy in how he tried to support people. He felt more human like that, and seeing him a little flustered and ticked off was satisfying. It was even a bit cute.

Not one to give up on something he'd set his mind to, Kudo-kun thought it was time I got up from that bench. Inspector Yamato had passed along an address for the flower shop. Kudo-kun was going, and he wanted me to go with him. I told him he should ask me nicely, and I would consider it.

He rolled his eyes. "Oi, oi," he said.

* * *

The flower shop was three blocks from the graveyard. The clerk on duty claimed that he'd been working the day before, but he hadn't seen anyone like Amari-san. He'd taken a break around lunchtime, but since Amari-san would've had to be on her way to Doctor Hayami's clinic, we didn't think it likely that she would've gone to the flower shop first. Doctor Hayami hadn't said anything about flowers, either.

Kudo-kun asked the clerk for some business records, reasoning that we could find out when or if Amari-san had been there by searching for an order or a receipt, but the cashier was hesitant to do that himself. He needed approval from a manager or the owner for that. Fortunately, there was a manager on duty—a man named _Momose Arata_. Despite his position, Momose-san couldn't have been past his late 20s.

Once Momose-san knew what we were looking for, he slid the keyboard to the store computer aside. He didn't need a computer to tell us everything we needed to know. "A bundle of purple hyacinths," he said, echoing what Inspector Yamato had asked for. "I took care of that order." According to Momose-san, he'd asked the cashier to take a break around 15:00 the previous day. Amari-san apparently came in around that time, and sure enough, Amari-san's order was in the system as having been picked up at 15:02.

That all added up, but Kudo-kun was unsatisfied with Momose-san's account. Did Momose-san usually tell his cashier to take a break at 15:00? "No," Momose-san admitted. "I just felt like he could use it."

"You were unusually busy?" asked Kudo-kun.

"People work better if they have periodic breaks."

We all understood that, but Kudo-kun still found it strange. If Momose-san didn't usually ask his cashiers to take breaks at that time, why did he remember the time so precisely?

"People are many things," said Kudo-kun. "They can be creative and beautiful, but they are seldom precise. We misremember things all the time, yet you say you know when you told the cashier to take a break. You knew this even before you looked up Amari-san's order. Did something happen at that time?"

"I don't remember anything in particular."

Kudo-kun seemed to be chomping at the bit to ask another question, but Inspector Yamato shot him a look, and she took over. "Amari-san—is she a regular customer here?"

Momose-san opened his mouth but stopped himself. He took a cursory look at the store computer and said, "Yes, she calls every three months and orders the same thing every time: a bouquet of purple hyacinths."

The inspector echoed him back. She came by every three months—had he ever served Amari-san before? It turned out he had, and he thought it was unusual to see her in the afternoon. Usually she stopped by in the morning. They'd spoken a little previously, mostly when he'd offered to show her some other flowers she might be interested in, if she ever decided to change from the hyacinths. In his opinion, she'd seemed gentle and personable. He'd asked a little about what she did for a living, and she'd responded in kind, asking about his career and where he'd gone to university.

"Momose-san," I said, "were you aware that Amari-san had placed an order? Were you aware that she was late picking up that order?"

"I was."

I shot Kudo-kun a look, and he seemed to be picking up on what I was getting at. He laughed to himself. I think he was a little embarrassed that he hadn't picked up on Momose-san's motives until just then. "What was your interest in Amari-san?" he asked.

Momose-san looked away in some embarrassment. He'd been keeping an eye out for Amari-san for some time. Sometime the previous year, he'd tried to upsell her on some carnations. She'd declined, but he'd thought her politeness and knowledge of flowers attractive. When Amari-san had by the day before, he made his interest known to her: he asked if she had a boyfriend or if she wanted one. Amari-san, though flattered, had said that she was busy with her studies and not ready to date for some time.

"She was very polite about it," Momose-san insisted. "I thought, you know, maybe when she finished her degree, she'd consider it."

Inspector Yamato wasn't happy with that answer. She asked that Momose-san go with one of her detectives to headquarters to be questioned more thoroughly. Momose-san seemed resigned to that. "I guess trying to get to know a woman who's just visiting her grandfather's grave is too weird, isn't it?"

"Did Amari-san tell you she was visiting her grandfather?" I asked.

He frowned at that. "No, but I assumed it was something like that. The flowers were always paid for by someone by the name _Ohara_, so…"

* * *

Amari-san's paternal grandmother, Ohara Kasumi, wasn't hard to reach: once she got wind that her granddaughter was missing, Ohara-san had her second son take her to the graveyard. By the time Inspector Yamato, Kudo-kun, and I returned to the scene, one of the police officers guided us to Ohara-san, who was leaning on her cane just outside the caution tape.

Amari-sensei's attitude toward her in-laws had made me think Ohara-san might be difficult to talk to, but as the grandmother introduced herself, she came off as firm, but also polite and fair. "Thank you for looking for my granddaughter," she said to us. "Can you tell me anything about what happened?"

All Inspector Yamato would say was that we'd found evidence that Amari-san had been attacked near her father's grave. With what we'd learned from the flower shop, it was natural to ask if Ohara-san expected her granddaughter to be there.

"I always paid for the flowers, yes," she explained. "It was the least I could do." According to Ohara-san, in the immediate aftermath of her son's death, her family and Amari-san's became distant, but Amari-san eventually reached out, over Amari-sensei's objections, and grandmother and granddaughter had enjoyed normal relations since. "Kagura's a wonderful child. She's going to do great things someday. I'm happy that she still loves her father, in spite of everything."

"Should she?" asked Kudo-kun. "I've only just read about what happened with your son last night. Amari-sensei didn't say much—"

"Don't listen to her!" Ohara-san snapped. "That woman is disconnected from reality."

In Ohara-san's mind, Amari-sensei was too proud of what she'd done. Ohara-san had entrusted her son's well-being to his wife, and she felt that trust was betrayed.

"My son was not an abuser," Ohara-san insisted. "By the time he started doing those things, he was no longer himself."

Amari-san's father had had a brain tumor. It was in the autopsy report; anyone with access to that would see for themselves. Kudo-kun hadn't because he'd only relied on press archives. This was information that wasn't made public, but Ohara-san and her family all knew. Amari-san knew. Amari-sensei knew.

"So the flowers, the grave visits," said the inspector, "were because your granddaughter feels her father was not responsible for his actions?"

Ohara-san sighed. Though she'd spoken with doctors and experts for years, trying to find out whether her son had been in his right mind when he died, none of them could say for sure. Parts of his personality could've been affected. Portions of the brain that control aggression and inhibitions—they were all vulnerable. Ultimately, even if Ohara-san couldn't say that her son had lost the capacity to control himself, she blamed Amari-sensei for not seeing the signs. "Someone should've realized it," she maintained. "That woman let my son down."

"So the purple hyacinths are an apology," I concluded.

"Purple hyacinths?" asked Ohara-san.

"The flowers Amari-san leaves for her father."

"Oh, I just pay for whatever she asks me to pay for. She chooses the flowers."

Inspector Yamato still had some questions for Ohara-san. Obviously she wasn't in any position to have attacked and subdued her own granddaughter, and accusing a family member of attacking another is hard to do delicately, but the inspector had to ask. As the inspector went over Ohara-san's alibi (she could hardly go anywhere without her second son helping her), I caught sight of Amari-sensei. She was being chaperoned by another police officer, and she kept her distance from us, but she was clearly watching. I would've been watching, too, if I had been her. She had to be wondering what Ohara-san had told us and how that contradicted what she'd told me.

I didn't let her wonder for very long. I drifted away from the conversation with Ohara-san while the inspector and Kudo-kun were quizzing her about her friends and business connections. I approached Amari-sensei.

"Did you find anything out about the flowers?" she asked, trying to hide her interest in her mother-in-law.

"We found out that your daughter gave her father flowers on every visit because he was sick," I said, "or so Ohara-san tells us."

Amari-sensei's gaze hardened, and she looked past me at Ohara-san. "She was awfully quick to believe it—to believe that the autopsy report meant he did nothing wrong, that it was _my_ fault, but she wasn't there. Well, if a mother doesn't believe her child is sweet and innocent, that says a lot, doesn't it?" Amari-sensei kept staring at her mother-in-law. "She didn't know him as a husband."

"How long did you think it would take for us to find out?"

She looked back at me steadily. "I told the truth."

"If we'd known the 'truth,' Sensei, we might be looking for the people who took your daughter instead of talking to your mother-in-law right now."

Amari-sensei insisted that she's concealed nothing of consequence. She resented her mother-in-law for peddling an unproven theory, but she wouldn't keep Amari-san from maintaining contact with Ohara-san. "Nobody did anything wrong here," Amari-sensei said while looking over the graveyard with a mournful expression. "There was nothing else any of us could've done."

"That's a convenient excuse," I said, "when you think you can say or do whatever you want and no one will punish you. Who do you think you are?"

She shot me a quizzical look, but before I could tell her off for it, Kudo-kun found me. "There you are," he said, holding my shoulder. "Now you're playing detective all by yourself, huh? Why don't you come with me? I want your opinion on something—unless you're not finished here."

Amari-sensei watched me expectantly, and Kudo-kun's firm grip told me what the answer should be. I shook my head, and Amari-sensei moved to go, shadowed by a police escort.

"You need to be careful," said Kudo-kun quietly, letting me go as we fell in step with each other. "You shouldn't ask someone questions alone."

I looked away, saying nothing.

"Are you all right?" he asked. "You're flushed."

I felt my cheek, and it was uncomfortably hot to the touch. I hadn't realized it while talking with Amari-sensei, but my heart was pounding. It was like someone had taken the strongest black coffee and injected it into my veins.

"I didn't know you liked me that much," Kudo-kun remarked.

I glared at him, and he complained I couldn't take a joke, but I didn't answer. I needed to breathe for a bit, but being around the graveyard wasn't helping. Like Amari-san, her mother, and her grandmother, I'd known too much about death and the lies people tell about it to feel at ease.

Kudo-kun sensed my uneasiness, and he offered his hand. "I'm not going to let anything happen to her," he promised. "Not again."

It was a promise he had no way of knowing he could keep it. For all we knew, Amari-san could've already been harmed, but I appreciated that even someone as devoted to reason as he was could offer a comfortable lie when the situation called for it.

Even so, I curled my hand around his fingers and closed his fist for him. "I'm not some fragile flower that needs help to stand up straight," I told him.

"All right, all right," he said. He wasn't going to push me, and I was thankful for that. He knew better than to say anything else, even as I held on to his closed fist.


	6. Nagano Prefectural Police Headquarters

We headed back to Nagano City with a mountain of evidence but only a pebble of understanding. Inspector Yamato and Kudo-kun went back and forth about what could've happened to Amari-san, but they had only wild theories and speculation. A young woman had been at her father's grave at one moment and gone the next, and no one could say who had taken her, how they'd made her disappear, or why they'd targeted her. It was senseless and galling, and there was no solace to be found in it. Amari-san had vanished on a rainy afternoon, but terrible things happen to people even on beautiful days.

Kudo-kun wasn't deterred, of course. He was busy trying to figure out which areas of the graveyard might've been covered by security cameras, and it shocked me that he could move so quickly from one line of thinking to the next. Our investigation into what Amari-san was doing at the grave, what her relationship was with her father and his family, and what had happened back when she was in middle school—nothing had come of all that. We'd invaded her privacy for nothing. Yes, Kudo-kun and I had found the wallet at the graveyard. In all likelihood, a groundskeeper would've found it anyway.

I should've gone home, but to ask one of the police officers to divert that way would've been even worse, and when I had to produce identification to be let into the Nagano Prefectural Police headquarters, it seemed like it was too late to change my mind. I couldn't just get out of the car and start walking at that point. I had to see it through to the end.

Inspector Yamato showed us to the main building. There was a small, temporary office space that she'd set aside for Kudo-kun to use. It wasn't fancy or convenient—it was on the other side of the building from the Inspector's office—but it gave Kudo-kun and me a place to sit down, look over the evidence, and think. What surprised me was that Kudo-kun didn't seem at all surprised. "Must be nice for someone to be so heavily relied upon by the police that he practically works for them," I said. "With an office and everything."

Kudo-kun was so absorbed in some crime scene photos that he didn't look up. "I don't make a habit of sitting at a desk when working cases, but sometimes the situation calls for it."

"How diligent of you."

He shot me a sidelong glance, looking annoyed. "I'm getting something to drink. You want anything?"

I told him I'd pass, and he muttered something about me being a stick in the mud, but I didn't completely hear it. Either way, he had no right to complain. I could've stood some peace and quiet in my life.

When Kudo-kun was gone, I put two fingers to my neck to check my pulse. It was slower and steady, which was a relief. Whatever had bothered me at the graveyard had passed, and I was myself again. It was better not being right there at the scene, and who wouldn't feel calmed—or even a little bored—under a set of cold, fluorescent lights?

Since Kudo-kun was taking a while, I decided to do some work myself. I didn't have an account on the police network, but Kudo-kun hadn't been particularly secretive about his password: _Wyh371,wr,h1,mb77_ or, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". It was naive of him, considering he'd already seen me break into Amari-san's account, to leave his own unprotected.

The police had identified two cameras that could be of use: a traffic camera at a nearby intersection and a security camera outside a post office. These cameras were low-resolution and had fixed angles, but they had been continuously recording, and the owners of the footage had agreed to turn over what they had, at least for the time around the possible abduction.

The time window was so narrow, and the odds of catching something so low, that it stunned me when I saw Amari-san in plain view on the post office footage. That camera had been pointed to monitor ATM customers, so it wasn't perfect, but despite the poor angle, I recognized Amari-san for her short stature and the bundle of purple hyacinths she carried with her. The angle was only good enough to see her enter the graveyard. The rest of her private communion with her father's spirit was out of sight.

It was just as I was trying to correlate the timestamps between the two videos that Kudo-kun finally came back to do some of the work he was supposed to be doing. What had taken him so long? Just a walk to the vending machines downstairs, that was all. And one drink wasn't enough for him; he got not one but _two_ cans of coffee!

"If you drink all of that, your heart will explode," I told him.

"Ha ha," he said dryly, and he put the second coffee—a can of Georgia café au lait—in front of me. "Since you're the type to say you're fine when you're actually not, here, a drink."

"How did you—"

"I'm a detective," he said, as if explaining to a slow child. "Don't worry about paying me back, either. I took the money from your purse."

I scowled, and I went through my coinpurse to find that I was 150 yen short of what I'd thought I had. "If you're going to do someone a favor," I said, "at least do it with your own money!"

"Drink already."

I glared at him, but I took a drink. There was a vending machine at Shinshu with cans of Georgia café au lait, and I'd sunk a lot of money into it over the years. Only Professor Noto and my colleagues would know that. I decided that, when we were through with all of this, I needed to have a chat with Professor Noto again and see what else she'd been blabbing about.

"Feeling better?" he said, looking all too pleased with himself.

For the record, I'd been feeling better even before he'd come back with coffee bought with my money. Maybe it had been because he'd left the room. Either way, if the coffee was helping, it wasn't by much. "What is it I should be feeling better about?" I said as I put the can down.

He motioned for me to get out of his chair, and when he realized I'd logged into the locked computer, he shot me a curious glance, but he ignored it and moved on. "Your friend being missing, maybe. Anyone would be worn out after all this."

"Somehow I get the sense that's not what you had in mind."

"It's not about your sister, is it?"

I glared at him. This was no time to be digging into the past. There were enough bodies to trip over in the present.

Still, when I was done burning a hole through Kudo-kun's face, I had to admit—only to myself, since I wouldn't give him the pleasure—that he might've been right. The uneasiness I'd felt outside the graveyard and the anger that had taken me while talking to Amari-san's mother—those were both things I'd felt before, while trying to figure out what had happened to my sister and who'd lied to me about it.

My sister and I had had a standing lunch date that she abruptly missed. I'd tried getting a hold of her, but she wouldn't respond. She wasn't home. She'd already been in trouble. She'd been doing dangerous jobs and hiding details from me. I could only assume something had gone wrong, but there was a period of about twelve hours in which I couldn't reach her, couldn't get in touch with anyone handling her—all I could do was wait.

My sister died that day, and there'd been nothing I could do about it.

She'd been in a dangerous business. I'd known that. I'd tried telling her to get out, but she hadn't. Her death wasn't much of a shock. It hurt terribly, but I'd been expecting it. I was more angry about the lies. Her handlers had tried to tell me it'd all gone wrong for her, that she'd been cornered and given up all hope. No way. Not my sister. There was no way she would've given up. I'd never thought her the type to be ruthless, to fight her way out of a bad situation, but to say that she would've killed herself rather than be taken by the police? No way. I knew who she worked with. I knew how they operated. She wouldn't have taken a job unless they approved of it, but they couldn't answer basic questions about when she'd taken the job, who was going to work with her, or any of that.

I'd kept asking those questions. It was the first time I tried playing my hand at being a detective, and I was surprisingly good at it. If they were really supporting her, why did they stand by while one member of her team betrayed them and took off with the money? Why did they let it play out so messily, letting the police find her body with potentially incriminating evidence still on her person? It didn't make sense. None of what they would tell me made sense.

It didn't make sense until I got one of them to admit the truth: she hadn't tried to commit suicide at all. They'd framed her for her own death. They were the ones who'd decided she had to go. The truth had been slippery, but I'd caught it, and I could never let it go. Knowing what those people had done to my sister, I could never let it go.

While I'd been thinking back on those days, Kudo-kun had turned his attention to the videos I'd been comparing. It was because he wasn't looking at me that I could look back at him and wonder just what he thought about my sister and what I'd felt back then.

"Is that why you came so quickly?" I asked. "Because of my sister and how you couldn't help her?"

He huffed. "You asked me for help, and here I am, and now you question why I would give it?"

"I wasn't thinking especially clearly at the time. If I had been, I would've placed a call to Osaka."

He snorted. "And rope Hattori into this? Get out of here." He shook his head in disbelief. "Here I thought you knew. There's no other reason, Haibara. All you have to do is ask for my help and I'll be there. When you let a wounded bird go free, you should still watch over it until it makes its nest."

Leave it to Kudo-kun to think he had to watch over me like I was some crippled duckling. Nevertheless, as guardian angels go, you could do much worse than Kudo Shinichi. That day, as we pored over low-resolution security camera footage, Kudo-kun's keen eye caught details I thought too pixellated to make out. Though I'd already found Amari-san on tape, I was having trouble reconciling the post office footage with the traffic video. They were from two different sides of the graveyard. Kudo-kun took a record of every car that went through the intersection, preferring those that could've gone near the post office. The key was a young man on a moped; that was distinctive enough that we could be sure. It turned out the post office camera's clock had drifted some twenty minutes slow without anyone noticing.

With our timestamps roughly correlated between the two cameras, Kudo-kun asked me to set up on a nearby computer and pore over footage with him. We were looking for some kind of large bag or a tarp—something that Amari-san could've been dragged away on. It didn't require much ingenuity. Far from it, this was the sort of task I would've tried to automate as much as possible if it'd come up in the course of my research, but low-resolution cameras and computer vision don't mix well.

We split up the videos into fifteen-minute chunks, not knowing how long Amari-san had been at the graveyard, but after an hour of painstakingly cataloguing every motor vehicle that went around the graveyard—including some models that I hadn't known existed—I needed a break. Kudo-kun, on the other hand, had hardly finished half of his can of coffee. He was tireless, and if I wanted to go take a walk, or maybe buy some noodles from the vending machines, that was up to me. He threw money at me, oblivious to all appearances, and never took his eyes off the screen.

I opted for the noodles since I didn't want to leave the station to eat. I had to get directions from the police officer who was sharing the makeshift office with us—I was fairly sure he was meant to watch us as much as to get work done. Still, I didn't think there would be a problem just getting some noodles until I ran into Inspector Yamato there. "Ah, Miyano-san, you're hungry, too?" she asked.

I'd initially pegged Inspector Yamato as a cool, by-the-book type, but the way she was trying to make small-talk with me indicated she was talkative and sociable instead. I didn't care much for that combination—someone serious enough to use their sociability to pursue their own ends.

"Kudo-kun threw some money at me to get him something," I explained. "How are the interrogations going?"

She sighed. It seemed that we'd waded into a family feud and, unless it turned up some evidence of overt actions, she felt it was going nowhere. The flower shop manager seemed like just a lovestruck young man who didn't know how to observe proper decorum. So far, no one had offered a good reason why Amari-san would've been the target of foul play. For my part, I wasn't too worried about _why_; Kudo-kun and I may have been on to something with the video analysis. The inspector was pleased to hear that, and she asked if we'd forward our findings to their analysts to help uncover a little more. I said we would, and I hoped that would be the end of our conversation, but it wasn't.

"It's good that you're here," she remarked. "You know, I've known Shinichi-kun a long time. It's not often that he seems comfortable working so closely with someone."

"He seems more the type to work in his own little world and only occasionally yank someone into it to show how clever he is," I said.

"He _is_ a bit of a showboat, isn't he? I worked a case with him two years ago at the Grand Shrine of Suwa, and he dressed up in full ceremonial garb to exposed a deranged priest, just for the hell of it!"

I tried creeping away, but the inspector took one look at the cup of noodles.

"You need to get some water and heat that up, right? This way."

I followed, not really having any other choice, and the inspector continued to probe me for a reaction. I was one of the few people who could speak about Kudo-kun and the little problem that had sidetracked him during his high school years. She didn't bother hiding her curiosity, but I wasn't about to give her what she wanted. "I'm just trying to earn my degree," I told her. "I'm a scientist. Everything that happened before is in the past."

"Ah, but it's not entirely in the past, is it? You still have Shinichi-kun's number in case you need him. We all dig into the past when it suits us and cast it aside when it's inconvenient."

Perhaps most people did, but not everyone. Kudo-kun was the same as always—he ate, breathed, and slept with murder on the brain. He could go on that way forever and never tire of it.

The inspector laughed. "He spends so much time working that it makes you wonder if anything else even goes through his head."

The only thing that came to mind was the bracelet still on his wrist, but I didn't remark on it.

The inspector segued from that to ask me about my hobbies. I told her innocently that I kept up with fashion, and though I'd broken up with an ex-boyfriend, he'd introduced me to amateur astronomy, and we had a few friends who would go out in the countryside at night to get away from the light pollution and see what stars we could make out. I tried telling her about that, but as soon as I put some boiling water in the cup of noodles, the inspector seemed queasy.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"I'm fine," she said, distancing herself from me. "I'm just a little sensitive these days. Don't mind me. You make sure he eats those."

"You think he wouldn't?"

The inspector shrugged, and when she felt better, she offered to show me back to the office.

When I got back, I found that Kudo-kun was gone. The other officer sharing the space with us said that Kudo-kun had left so quickly that his hair may have been on fire. Maybe that would've singed off Kudo-kun's unsightly cowlick. If so, it would've been a public service.

As for what Kudo-kun could've found so interesting, I took another look at his computer and found that he'd matched up some footage from the two angles to focus on a white van that had parked on the perimeter of the graveyard. It was just on the corner of the post office camera's view, but over the course of a few seconds, you could make out something looking like a blue tarp being loaded into the back of that van, and whatever was being held inside was heavy.

Since Kudo-kun was probably trying to convince the other officers that he'd found the kidnapper, I pored over his notes and the footage to see what else he might've learned. His notes didn't make much sense, though; they were coded in some unintelligible shorthand from which I could make read only a few fragments, such as the words _time_ and _view_, which I weren't sure meant what they ordinarily did. Aside from that, there were a few remarks in plain text, only in the margins. _You don't need a reason to save a life,_ he wrote in one place. I thought that was almost too innocent for a man like him, but there was also something else:

_The pursuit of truth MUST be its own reward._

I flipped through his notebook and found that written in enough margins that I didn't feel like searching anymore. Kudo-kun's noodles were getting cold, and since I didn't know when he'd be coming back, I looked through my bag to pay him back for the money he'd given me. While searching for my coinpurse, I found three fifty-yen coins loose at the bottom of my bag—something I hated, since loose change tends to make noise. I put those coins and three others in a small side pocket of his bag, and as I ate his noodles, I wondered how long it would take for him to find the change, or if he would say anything about it when he did.


	7. Ohara Family Resort

According to the license plate, the white van belonged to a landscaping company based in Toyama, but the police quickly realized that we'd been deceived: the landscapers' van had a company logo on each side, but the van on the video was unmarked. Whoever had abducted Amari-san had also used fake plates to help cover their tracks. Counterfeit plates good enough to pass as real were rare—the inspector couldn't think of another case like it in Nagano. She decided it would be best to consult with national police colleagues to try to get more information on the subject. While she was working the phones, Kudo-kun investigated the suspects' financial records. If buying a counterfeit plate cost a great deal of money, then the most suspicious persons of interest were the ones with sizeable investments or cash on hand.

Of the persons of interest we'd met, Kudo-kun narrowed down that list to three: Doctor Hayami, Grandma Ohara, and Professor Noto. Since I'd found the apartment broken into, I had to be a suspect, but I didn't have the cash to pay for counterfeit plates. Amari-sensei was not well paid as a high school teacher. It seemed unlikely she would've been able to put up the cash. The flower shop manager also seemed out of his depth in that respect. Compared to them, Doctor Hayami had a profitable practice. He could've easily taken out loans against the business if needed. Professor Noto was not just a tenured professor but had made a small fortune off of patents from early in her career. Ohara-san, the last suspect, owned resort properties in the mountains through her late husband. That rang a bell with one of Inspector Yamato's detectives, who'd spoken with Amari-sensei about the Ohara family's holdings. The police were cautious about investigating based on the word of another person of interest, but Kudo-kun was eager to look into it. "If we don't eliminate the obvious, we'll feel pretty foolish if it turns out to be the key to cracking this case," he argued.

It wasn't just good diligence. We posed as potential buyers to get in touch with Ohara-san's realtor, and while she was unwilling to tell us too much over the phone, she let slip that someone else had been interested in the property and had already asked for some details. That was enough for Kudo-kun to become curious.

"Well," he said to me, "how do you feel about a trip to the mountains?"

Considering that it was for business and not pleasure, I didn't love the idea, but it needed to be done. Kudo-kun arranged to rent a car, not wanting to be at the mercy of taxicabs and public transport when going far out of town, and we headed to the mountains outside of Iiyama.

* * *

Ohara-san's property had been abandoned for some time. The road up to that section of the property had been chained off, and the path was muddy and full of pits. To make matters worse, Kudo-kun was a terrible driver. When he should've been dodging those ruts and managing the car's transmission to keep us from slipping, he was busy looking around the road for clues. I never drive, but an experience like that made me consider learning!

At the end of the dirt road, there was a small guardhouse with a security officer on duty. The man waved out of the window to flag us down, as there wasn't any barrier or gate to keep us from driving further onto the property. He asked to see some identification, saying that the Ohara family was worried about tourists wandering down the wrong road. He asked what we were doing there, and Kudo-kun said that we were potential buyers—which I thought no one would believe, since we were so young, but Kudo-kun really tried to sell the idea, showing off his engagement bracelet and what he called a "flashy transmitter badge." He painted himself as a rich kid with some unusual gadgets, and it seemed to work: the guard waved us through and went back to fiddling with his phone. I wasn't even sure the guardhouse had power.

The Ohara property had fallen into a state of disrepair. A pasture area was overgrown with weeds. A toolshed had a visible hole in the wall, and bags of fertilizer had soaked through the floor, leaking chemicals into the ground.

All in all, we hadn't seen anything out of the ordinary. That Ohara-san wanted to get rid of that property seemed reasonable. It wasn't large enough for another resort, but maybe someone could build a house there and call it a vacation home. I didn't think much of the place, and the light was fading. I thought we should quickly survey the area and head back. The guard hadn't said anything about anyone else having been around or why Ohara-san wanted to sell suddenly, even though her husband had died years before, so we were running out of reasons to be there, but Kudo-kun kept looking around. It was as we were coming up to an abandoned stable that he found some tire tracks on the dirt road. They were a mix of old ones and new ones—older ones that had dried from the rain the previous afternoon, newer ones that weren't as deep because the ground had hardened since. Someone had come and gone.

"Call it in," Kudo-kun told me. "Stay out of sight. I'll look inside."

If he thought I was going to stay behind and hide, he had to be insane. It didn't matter how many cute gadgets he thought would help him. What did he have? Only a soccer ball and a trick wristwatch with a flashlight. I couldn't believe he was still putting so much faith in those unreliable gadgets! That might catch someone by surprise, but in a gunfight, it couldn't have been better than 50/50 odds of getting killed, and it wasn't like I'd be any safer all alone, either. Seeing that I wouldn't back down, Kudo-kun offered me the watch. It was a start.

We peered inside the stables, knowing that no amount of stealth would help us: the light from his watch cut through the dark, unlit structure, and our footsteps crunched on the dirt and hay. "Anybody here?" Kudo-kun called out, but there was no answer. I'm not sure if I hoped there would be one.

We scanned the stables one stall at a time, and halfway down, we found some curious items. The first was a photo with a push-pin through it. It lay outside one stall, and though some dirt was on top of it, the contents of the image were clear: a puncture wound in a cadaver. Kudo-kun was insistent we shouldn't touch it. Moving into the stall, we found a round pipe standing vertically near the back wall, possibly for a water delivery system. The pipe showed some scuff and scratch marks about waist high. Finally, there was a slight odor of ammonia, and we tracked the source to a yellow bucket with some sort of liquid inside. With the low light in the stables, Kudo-kun wasn't clear what it was on first glance, but I hovered a hand over it and found that it was warm.

"It's fresh urine," I told him. "Someone was just here."

Kudo-kun's eyes flashed, and he tip-toed out of the stall as fast as I'd ever seen anyone do so. He got on the phone with the inspector, urging her to have her people come analyze the scene. In the meantime, we got back in the rental car and raced back to the guardhouse.

No one was there. The guard and his car were gone.

* * *

When questioned about the guard, Ohara-san pleaded ignorance, but the bucket and the suspicious guard were enough for the police to have Ohara-san and her second son, Ohara Yota, detained for a questioning period, but even forty-eight hours of questioning posed a serious risk to Amari-san, who could've been out of the prefecture or dead by then. In the meantime, the detectives and analysts arrived to collect evidence. Kudo-kun briefed the police on what we had and hadn't touched, and he was hopeful about the situation. "They wanted Amari-san alive," he reasoned, and there were no signs of torture or great physical harm. She'd been subjected to some indignity, but that was all. Because of that, there was hope that she wouldn't be hurt later. Perhaps the kidnappers wanted a ransom, and Amari-sensei, afraid of what would happen, had declined to tell us the truth.

I found all this speculation exhausting. It was getting late in the day, and the course of this case was like following a Möbius strip in the vain hope that we wound find its end. Professor Noto started calling me, hoping that we'd found something, but I couldn't bear to tell her what we'd found. Never mind that the details had to remain secret for security reasons. How could I tell her that Amari-san had been chained up like an animal? And that we still hadn't found her?

While the police were collecting evidence from the stables, hoping for a strand of hair or something else that might point to the culprit, Kudo-kun focused on the photo we'd found. Along with the photo was, we'd discovered later, a long piece of yellow yarn. Kudo-kun suspected that whoever had taken Amari-san was ultimately interested in information. The photo was of the corpse of Amari-san's father, focusing on the wound that had taken his life. "I've done the same thing," Kudo-kun explained to me, "to make sense of disparate evidence that seems to contradict itself."

So our culprit, Kudo-kun believed, was another detective?

Kudo-kun wouldn't say that in so many words, but it was clear he was considering it. At the time, I found the implication disturbing. There he was, supposedly helping us find Amari-san, but he was really putting himself in the mind of the kidnapper. I couldn't relate to that. Why would I want to put myself in the same state of mind as some evil person? That was nothing I wanted in my head. I had enough running through my mind already. Seeing the place where Amari-san had been chained up was unpleasant. It's a special kind of panic and dread—being tied up like a dog waiting to be put down. I could feel the bindings around my wrists almost as surely as Amari-san had. It made me sick to my stomach.

That's why, as the effort to collect evidence from the scene dragged on, I didn't feel hungry, but with the sun setting and most of us not having eaten properly, energy and fatigue were becoming important. The police were careful not to eat in the immediate vicinity of the crime scene. The most they would allow was for us to snack on energy bars and to drink coffee some distance from the stables. I wasn't hungry, but I couldn't stand to be in that degrading place for too long. Urine isn't supposed to smell strongly, but I would've sworn that I could smell that bucket from halfway across the property.

It was over an hour before Kudo-kun, the inspector, and the cadre of police detectives emerged from the stables to take a break. While the others helped themselves to nutrition bars and coffee, Kudo-kun headed straight for the rental car, attached his phone to a laptop, cursed the weak cell service there, and started browsing the Internet for clues about the death of Amari-san's father. He was convinced there was something we were missing, some key facet of that case that would tell us who had done this to Amari-san and why. His energy made one rookie detective resentful. _Who does he think he is,_ the rookie must've thought, _to keep working when we're all taking a break?_ I didn't think it was a great idea, either. Kudo-kun couldn't have eaten after we'd headed to the Hayami clinic that morning. The last thing I needed was for him to keel over. He was the only one allowed to drive the rental car, after all.

I took an energy bar his way, and Kudo-kun didn't even look up when I opened the passenger-side door and sat in the back with him. I put the energy bar next to him wordlessly, but he put it aside. "I'll eat later," he said.

"You should eat now," I insisted. "The pursuit of truth is its own reward. That means it doesn't do anything for your blood sugar."

"How much time did you spend rifling through my notes?"

Enough to start deciphering his shorthand. Only enough to _start_, not enough to actually make sense of it.

Kudo-kun sighed, and he moved the laptop aside while unwrapping the energy bar. "Since you're just going to nag until I give in," he said, "I'll eat, but that stuff about the 'pursuit of truth'—it's not what you think."

"So it's not something you came to believe after your breakup?"

He choked on a bite of the energy bar. Really, how could someone so easy to read be a formidable detective?

After taking a sip of water from a bottle he kept in his bag, Kudo-kun explained that the "pursuit of truth" was just something he liked to keep in mind when trying to balance his personal life with his professional interests. "Solving cases has to be worth it for its own sake. Sometimes you solve a case and you don't actually stop the culprit from doing what they wanted to do. Sometimes you solve a case and no one else cares anymore." He tightened the cap on his water bottle, looking confident and sure. "But more often than not, it's better in the end if you can find the truth."

That all sounded reasonable. How could any of that have been a problem with his fiancée?

I asked him about that, and he sighed. "I cared a little too much about my cases even when I was with her."

"Even though you'd loved her since childhood?"

He winced. "Tell me what you really think, why don't you? It's not like I'm proud of it. I would've wanted to make it right." He would've wanted to make it right, but he didn't have the chance. He always meant to. He'd had a mutual friend invite her to a party. He meant to ask for another chance then, wanting to say that he was a changed man and he'd worked on separating his work from their happiness, but it was too late: she was already seeing someone else—another med student, a dentist of all things. "What the hell is interesting about a dentist?" he wondered, a reminder that Kudo Shinichi could be petty, and not just in jest, but that sentiment didn't last, either. "They're happy together, and that's the most important thing."

"And you?" I asked.

He scowled. "Who do you think you're looking at? I'm at the top of my game, you know!"

"You're not looking for a cute girlfriend to show you're over your last relationship?"

He found the idea repugnant. "I'd only date someone if I were serious about it. It's not about appearances."

That was respectable at least.

"What's with the interest in my love life all of a sudden?" he asked, narrowing his eyes.

I was only concerned for Amari-san's well-being, and if Kudo-kun was pushing himself out of some idea of doing penance for his failed relationship, that wouldn't serve anyone's best interests. For the moment, I was satisfied he wasn't a total fool, so we could have the rest of that conversation another time. Of course, Kudo-kun didn't want to take that as an answer, but I managed to distract him with questions about the case, and he was all too happy to oblige me. Kudo-kun was running with the theory that the kidnapper wished to interrogate Amari-san about the circumstances of her father's death. Just from the photo he'd seen left on the ground, Kudo-kun had realized something:

"If you're defending yourself from your abusive husband, how do you get a hold of your garden shears and stab him in the back?" he wondered.

That no one had asked this important question during the original investigation was stomach-churning, exceeded only by the thought that Amari-sensei may have murdered her husband, that Ohara-san had kidnapped her own granddaughter to prove it, and that Amari-san was still out there somewhere, wrapped up in a blue tarp, not knowing if she would live or die. We might find her kidnapper and rescue her, but nothing we could do would change the rest of that.

"The pursuit of truth must be its own reward," Kudo-kun reminded me. "Making something good come of that is a different matter."

It was a sad sentiment, coming from him, but I couldn't argue with it.

* * *

And so, the cycle began again. The police scoured the area for surveillance cameras that might've been useful. They interviewed passers-by and guests at the Ohara resort to see if someone had noticed something. They sat Kudo-kun and me down with a sketch artist to get a composite of the fake security guard. They did a lot that would help prove who the culprits were once we caught them, but they couldn't do much to actually find them. It was a painstaking and tiring experience. Even though the police bought some pizza to help get through the late hours of the evening, that didn't do much to fill the hole in my stomach.

Since I'd been working with Kudo-kun, the inspector offered me a bunk on-site—something that police officers who couldn't afford the time to go home might use while working a case—but the last thing I wanted was to sleep in the presence of strangers. I wasn't a detective, and I hadn't uncovered much—only enough to know that Amari-san had been in a precarious situation. All I could do was dig up more uncomfortable secrets with nothing to show for it.

Even if I could've done more, I didn't think anything would come of it. The story of Amari Kagura was coming to a close. She survived her abusive father and the trauma of seeing him die by her mother's hand. Despite the stress and depression that followed, she pushed forward, finishing a master's degree in biochemistry and earning a spot in a renowned research group while she pursued her doctorate. She was a fine colleague and friend, but she knew something that people were interested in, and because of that, something terrible had happened to her. No doubt she would end up face down in an alley. It was just a matter of whether we'd ever find her and if her body would be recognizable even if we did.

In that respect, I thought Amari-san's life and death formed a classic, archetypal story. Many people in this world suffer the consequences of choices they can anticipate but can't do anything about. My sister suffered, knowing that her handlers would likely betray her because they'd never intended to honor the deal she'd made with them. She'd tried to hold a few cards up her sleeve, but in the end, they held all the trumps. She had nothing to offer them or to hold over their heads. She was expendable, and so, she was expended more casually than the shell casing that left her killer's gun. Less tragically, Kudo-kun must've hoped to prove to his fiancee he was a changed man, but it was a little too late. He had to have known that she could find someone else in the meantime, but he couldn't transform himself into a different person any faster. What he feared came to pass, and there was nothing he could've done about it.

I was no different from them. When my sister passed away, I confronted the people who'd worked with her—who'd killed her. I confronted them and didn't let it go, knowing that I could lose my life for challenging them. I could lose my life, and I did, in a way. They decided I was a threat and needed to be dealt with, and I spent a year in hiding from them, never sure if the next time I'd wake up was the last. I knew the consequences for challenging them, but I also knew in my heart that if I let it go, I wouldn't be able to live with myself.

Amari-san must've felt that way, too. She reached out to her grandmother, against her mother's wishes, because she knew the truth. She tried to coexist in both worlds, but such things are never stable. She had to have felt that way, too—keeping so much of it secret, even from me. I've been much the same. The people who took me in during my year in hiding, who befriended me when I had no one to turn to—most of them never knew what I was hiding from. That, I had thought, was for the best. I'd survived, but I'd lost more than my life. There were people I loved whom I had never trusted with the truth.

On the other side of that was Kudo-kun, who thought he knew me just because he'd always known my real name and who I was hiding from. Yet as smart as he was, there were some things he was clearly blind to—and I liked it that way. It made me feel a little safer, not to be read totally like an open book. Even so, having Kudo-kun around, with his sharp mind ready to cut through my lies at any time, was suffocating. It was like being stuck underwater, drowning in a deluge of memories, and though I could see the light of the surface not far from me, my view was refracted and wavy. Nothing I saw was 100% true.

I tried to sleep that night, but it was hard. The air was stuffy, and it felt like the lights outside my apartment were pouring through my eyelids. Any minute now—that's what I thought. Any minute now I should hear something.

It was 1:30 when my phone went off. It was a call from Kudo-kun. They'd found her, and he was coming by to take me there.

As much as I didn't like having Kudo-kun around, it was fitting that he was there. When my sister died, I was expecting it, at least a little. It was a foreseeable outcome in our business. What had surprised me was seeing the photos in the news—her photos, along with those of Kudo Shinichi, who had been working her case, trying to unravel a web of lies and murder before it ended up with all of them killed. Kudo Shinichi failed my sister, and for a long time, I'd wondered why. He was supposed to be brilliant. He was supposed to be a detective saw through every case, but he didn't piece it together. I knew when I saw his photo on the news that morning that I would have to meet Kudo Shinichi someday and see if he really lived up to the reputation he had.

Seeing Kudo-kun that night, I understood what he must've felt back then. He was uncommonly serious when he picked me up outside my apartment. "We'll find out who did this," he insisted, and while I appreciated the sentiment, I knew it was as much meant for his peace of mind as mine. Kudo-kun is the kind of detective who, if he fails to solve a case in time, he questions it. He wonders what he did wrong because he believes in the hype—he thinks he should solve every case. Was that expectation inherited from his idol Holmes? I couldn't say, but is it any wonder why such a man might take too much of his work home with him and neglect, however unintentionally, someone he holds dear?

* * *

Amari-san's body had been left in an alley not far from her apartment. A convenience store patron had noticed the blue tarp folded up and laying there, spurring a clerk to investigate. Two police cars and an ambulance were on the scene, and as we got out of the car, I realized I shouldn't have come. I didn't want to be there. With my sister, I'd found out she'd died well after the fact. I saw her smiles in photos, not the ghastly pallor of her dead face. Kudo-kun didn't fear any of that; he made for the ambulance, and I followed him. I didn't have anywhere else to go.

It wasn't until we got close enough to see her body on the stretcher that I could see what they were doing. They were hooking her up to a bag of fluids. You don't do that for a corpse. Her eyes were closed, but Amari-san was still alive.

I'm not often an emotional person, but I couldn't bear to look much longer. Those two days had been difficult for me. I cried. I cried almost as much as when I realized my sister had died, but it was a different kind of tears, and I didn't mind them.

As for Kudo-kun, he untucked a handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to me. "We'll find out who did this," he said again, but that time, it wasn't the brooding regret of a stymied detective. He was energized and alive, fully at home in the alternating lights of the police cars. The weight had come off him, and thought it was quite late, he was ready for more.


	8. Abnormal Rhythm

As I was growing up, I wondered if I should become a medical doctor, but a visit to a hospital changed my mind. At the time, I was deeply attached to one of the operatives in our outfit. He seemed cool and invincible, and he took out enemies without a second thought. I didn't realize until I was older that his disregard for danger was more madness than bravery. Back then, I thought he was everything I wanted to be.

Though no one could get the better of him, from time to time he would come back with cuts, scrapes, and other injuries. The least serious ones he shrugged off or found alternative treatments for, but one time, he came back impaled with a piece of rebar. He was a tough one; it didn't even slow him down. Still, we thought it serious enough that he should get to a hospital—one that was friendly to us and that wouldn't ask questions. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I visited him while he was recovering, and I've never forgotten it. Hospitals are supposed to be places of healing and care, but they make me uncomfortable. The stubborn infections that resist all treatment, the sense that everything is spotless and yet still dirty and infested, and the need to be strong and silent while death is near—all those reasons are why I couldn't stand the thought of practicing medicine.

Those thoughts came back to me while we waited for Amari-san to wake up. Kudo-kun and I sat in a waiting room as the wee hours of the morning passed, and as much as I wanted to sleep, I couldn't. There's a particular smell in some hospitals. It's hard to get out of your nose. I couldn't sleep, but I was still tired. The waiting room was empty but for Kudo-kun and me. The nurse at the monitoring station was doing paperwork. Occasionally another doctor or nurse would come by, and after a while, I stopped paying attention to them. None of them had anything to say to us. The cleaning staff didn't even have much to pick up from the bins.

Around seven o'clock, Professor Noto stopped by. She sat beside me and offered a water bottle. "You look like hell," she said.

The professor could be coy or blunt, depending on her mood. She was small in stature, not personality.

"You should sleep," she insisted, "but don't lean on me."

I told the professor I was fine, waving off the fatigue. I'd pulled plenty of all-nighters in the past. This was nothing. She should've worried about Kudo-kun instead. He was sitting across from us, but he sat only gently against the back of his chair, as if meditating instead of sleeping, but he'd been perfectly still for over an hour. I'd been on the phone with some friends who were concerned about Amari-san, and I'd even talked about how rude he was, even if they thought his face was nice to look at. None of it had bothered him. He must've been more tired than I'd thought.

"At least eat something," said the professor, offering me an energy bar.

I passed, and the professor, never one to give someone a chance to change their mind, ate it without a second thought.

"Do you know what happened?" she asked.

"Did you know," I asked her, "about her father?"

"I did," she said, and while she could've told us that first night at the lab, she had no intention of talking about it unless asked.

"You respect her privacy?" I remarked. That was a surprise. When I'd joined the group, it took her less than five minutes to tell everyone I'd spent my youth in America and that they should run questions about English by me.

The professor's eyes narrowed. "I know I can be cavalier, but there are some things even I wouldn't talk about openly."

That I could believe. Though she worked with us closely, Professor Noto was a private person. She was certainly capable of discretion. I knew she was unmarried, but I'd never even heard of her seeing someone. She had a jacket from a ski resort in the area, but she'd deflected questions about it before, saying only that a friend of hers recommended a slope.

We talked about what Kudo-kun and I had learned about the case, and the professor was surprised we'd found out so much about Amari-san. "He really is sharp, isn't he?"

"He's not like what you've heard," I told her.

The professor raised both eyebrows and shot me a look. "So you haven't enjoyed running around with him over these past two days?"

We'd been investigating Amari-san's disappearance, not going on a vacation. "Amari-san thinks he's descended from the heavens. He's anything but that. He's rude, arrogant, self-righteous, and nosy."

"So he's the right man for the job, then."

"He's the right man for every job."

"That almost sounds like a compliment."

Of course Professor Noto would like the idea of Kudo-kun being around. She was nosy, too. I said that to her face, and she didn't deny it.

"I've always been nosy—sometimes too nosy for my own good," she admitted, "but it's because I've been nosy that I can be sure of one thing: you and Kagura-kun aren't as different as you think."

I looked at her expectantly. "You don't say."

"No specifics," the professor said, chiding me. "Let's just go with this: I met her at the JNS conference after we'd exchanged some emails. She knew what she wanted. She wanted to be here, but it was more than just academic ambition. There are some people in this world who just know they need to accomplish something. They have to make good on the sacrifices other people have made to get them where they are. Kagura-kun is like that, and so are you. I saw that in her, so when we had dinner at the conference, what do you think I asked her?"

I closed my eyes. "What she would do if she achieved her goals and what she would do if she failed instead."

"People like you and Kagura-kun have real potential," the professor went on. "That's why I wanted you here."

The professor had always talked about that—about potential, about making good on what we'd learned and the experiences we'd been through. In that sense, it didn't surprise me that she'd chosen Amari-san in keeping with that philosophy, but why was that her way of doing this? At the time, all I knew was that she was an enormously successful academic with strong ties to the pharmaceutical industry and a few drug patents to her name. She made a lot of money consulting, enough that she didn't need to be a professor. It was not an easy life, with long hours and tough competition to succeed, but she'd never given a hint of considering something else.

I didn't have the chance to ask Professor Noto about that then. A nurse stopped by to tell us Amari-san was awake. We wouldn't be able to see her right away because Inspector Yamato and her people wanted to question her first, and they were still at police headquarters. We'd have to wait a little longer. Of course, Professor Noto didn't like that. She complained, "We have a perfectly good detective right here, and you're saying he can't go in and ask a few questions?"

"It's hospital policy, sorry," said the nurse. "Please be patient."

"Get the police over here as soon as you can, then," said the professor. "The longer they take, the longer Kagura-kun has to sit alone."

"We're getting someone on the phone right now."

"No need," said Kudo-kun, who was wide awake and putting his phone back into his pocket. "I've already messaged Inspector Yamato. She's on the way."

Professor Noto and I looked at each other. "How long have you been awake?" she asked.

"I was never asleep," Kudo-kun explained. "I was thinking."

"You're kidding."

Kudo-kun looked at me. "I'm always the right man for the job, huh?"

I took Professor Noto's energy bar wrapper and threw it at Kudo-kun's face. It left a satisfying brown smear on his chin from a piece of chocolate that had been stuck to the inside. Kudo-kun was not amused, but Professor Noto and I thought it was just fine.

* * *

Inspector Yamato and her detectives came by within half an hour to question Amari-san. They spent as long as they could in her hospital room, until her doctors insisted that she needed rest. For all the time they spent questioning her, the police uncovered little: Amari-san had no memory of her captivity. The last thing she remembered was the night before her doctor's appointment. The inspector asked her about the flower shop and her visit to the clinic, but Amari-san couldn't tell the detectives anything. The easy conclusion would've been that Amari-san had blotted out the ordeal, but Inspector Yamato asked the hospital and Amari-san for a toxicology report. Beyond that, the inspector was oddly hopeful: the whole circumstances of Amari-san's abduction had been strange. Because of that, she hoped they would find evidence of a pattern. Someone who kidnaps a victim only to leave her alive and largely unharmed, who uses false license plates to evade detection, who ambushes their victims in a public area, and who breaks into the victim's home to search for information—there had to be another case like that in the area. It was too specific. The inspector left to comb through some databases, and she gave Kudo-kun her blessing to continue investigating on his own.

Since Amari-san had to be tired, Kudo-kun thought it best to let Professor Noto and me talk with her first. He also thought it would be improper to let Professor Noto be present while he interviewed Amari-san, so it would be better for everyone if Professor Noto said her piece and left of her own accord. Aside from that, Kudo-kun thought no one would want to be questioned twice about a traumatic ordeal in rapid succession. "Make sure she's in a good state of mind first," he told me.

"How considerate of you," I said.

Kudo-kun made a face, and he fumbled over his words while trying to put together a response. "Well, uh…." He thought better of that, whatever he was going to say. "You know her best," he said at least. "If you think she's not up for it, let me know, and we can take a break."

Of course I would, but I admit I was relieved I wouldn't have to fight him about it if push came to shove. Kudo-kun was an intense, single-minded person sometimes. To see him being so gentle with Amari-san's treatment was strange.

I was allowed to go see Amari-san first, but I hesitated with my hand on the doorknob. It's never easy to see someone you know in a vulnerable state, but I also knew that it was no easier for the vulnerable person to see friends, either. I listened to the footsteps of nurses passing by and the dull rolling noises of gurneys on the other side of the ward. I tried to stop thinking, and that helped a little. Then, I turned the doorknob, feeling the mechanism move within my grip, and I went inside.

Amari-san was sitting up. She'd been looking out the window, even though the curtains were closed. The early-morning sun must've been attractive to her. When I came through the doorway, her head snapped toward me, and she tried to cover up her hospital gown with one of the sheets. "Shiho-chan?" she said. Her voice was weak and raspy. She cleared it a couple times, looking pained. Sipping on a glass of water, she motioned for me to come in.

"Time in the hospital isn't covered in your stipend," said Professor Noto, peering around me.

Amari-san laughed a little. "I asked for my laptop, but they wouldn't let me keep it. Can't I get a day off, Professor—just this one time?"

"Just this one time," said the professor, and the two of them smiled. The professor's joke had had the intended effect, but even Professor Noto couldn't keep the mood light forever. "How do you feel?" she asked.

Amari-san seemed embarrassed about being caught in a hospital gown. With that and all the sensors and the IV line, she was tethered to the hospital like a gnat in a spiderweb. She held out her arms, and the heart monitors and other wires and tubes moved with her.

"Don't think about it too much," the professor advised her.

Amari-san nodded, and she sat back in the hospital bed, sinking into the pillows and cushions. She asked about her grandmother in a roundabout way: was it true Ohara-san was being detained? It was, the professor confirmed, and Professor Noto wondered if Amari-san thought Ohara-san could've conspired against her. Amari-san insisted she couldn't imagine it, but she had no idea about what had happened to her, aside from what Inspector Yamato had said.

"Not even that morning, going to the appointment?" asked the professor.

Amari-san's eyes darted to me, then back to the professor. "I don't really want to talk about that."

"Shiho-kun knows," the professor explained. "She found out all on her own."

Professor Noto had never been one to beat around the bush, but I hadn't disliked her for it as much as I did that morning. Amari-san may have been naked under that hospital gown, but it was Professor Noto who exposed her, who took away the paper-thin protection of a perceived secret and left her with nothing. Amari-san looked away, and she reiterated what she'd said to the police: everything about the day she'd disappeared had been forgotten.

Professor Noto stood at Amari-san's bedside. "Don't worry about it too much," she said. "Some things are better forgotten." Amari-san shot her a questioning look, but the professor ignored it. She was all too happy to leave us to our own devices. "You two have some things to talk about," she said.

Amari-san wasn't sure whether to be thankful for that, but Professor Noto was out the door before either of us could protest. Looking uncomfortable, Amari-san turned her attention back to me. "What have you heard, exactly?"

I knew that Amari-san's father died by her mother's hand, that Amari-san had been seeing a therapist since, and that Amari-san likely had been visiting her father's grave when she was abducted.

Amari-san took the news well. She seemed steady and not too surprised. She apologized, of course, as people often do when they have nothing to apologize for. Staring at the opposite wall, she laughed. It was inevitable that someone would find out, right? That's was her reasoning, anyway, and she felt doubly conscious of it, wondering aloud if she should've been more upfront about all this from the beginning, rather than only feeling guilty about her silence after the fact.

"You don't have to feel guilty," I told her.

"That's nice of you to say," she said with a sad smile.

Well, if she wouldn't believe me, maybe she'd believe someone who had a reputation for sniffing out the sinful and immoral?

Amari-san seemed to catch on to what I was hinting at. She sat up and peered at the door, where the detective came through on my signal. Kudo-kun ducked in with a small wave. "Yo!" he said.

The EKG's beeping sped up, but Amari-san was too stunned to notice how awkward that was. She stammered. "You—you're—"

"I am," Kudo-said, cutting her off. Oh, he was enjoying this. He couldn't contain himself. Wearing a silly grin, he played himself off as some suave gentleman, ready to solve a case for this fair maiden client of his. He even did a bow for her! He'd never bothered to act so polite to me. "Kudo Shinichi, private detective, at your service. I hear you're a fan! I hope I can live up to your expectations."

"I doubt you will," I said.

Kudo-kun scowled. "Because Amari-san's expectations of me are sky-high?"

I didn't answer, which pissed off Kudo-kun nicely. I'd thought Amari-san would tell me off for being so rude to her idol, but she was still staring at him, totally stunned, like a salmon that had been pawed by a bear.

"Kudo-san is here to work my case?" Amari-san paled. Appealing to him, she said, "You didn't have to do that."

"I'm happy to," Kudo-kun assured her.

Amari-san looked at Kudo-kun, then at me, then back at home. "Well," she said after a time, "I put my trust in you for my case, then, Kudo-san. I hope you won't solve it so fast I don't even realize it! I don't know how I'd be able to tell people about it after if you pulled off something like that!"

Kudo-kun laughed, and he promised he would keep her informed every step of the way. She was a fan, after all; she should enjoy the experience, right? That's what he told her, but whenever Amari-san looked away, even if only for a moment here or there, I caught sight of Kudo-kun's scrutinizing gaze on her. There's a reason people like the metaphor of wheels turning inside a clever person's head: it gives the feeling of inevitability. Mechanical clocks seem to go on forever, bound by the laws of physics and the arrow of time. Of course, that's not entirely true. Even the most efficient mechanical clock slows down due to friction. Order turns to chaos, and information is lost forever, but for the moment, Kudo-kun watched Amari-san, and her heart beat faster while he was watching her, signified by the beeping of the EKG. Each of those beats was like the tick of a clock, and in less than seventy thousand beats, Kudo-kun would see through Amari-san and find out the truth.


	9. Reconstruction of a Lost Day

Amari-san rested until mid-afternoon. At that point, the doctors could find no indications of poisoning or other injuries, so at Amari-san's request, they released her. While the police pursued other leads, Kudo-kun and I took Amari-san back to her apartment, hoping to jog her memory.

Amari-san's apartment had been cleared of caution tape by that point, and the intruder hadn't made much of a mess, so there wasn't much to clean. Instead, we went over some basic questions: how could an intruder have known Amari-san's alarm code, and what might they have been looking for? Faced with the deactivated alarm, Amari-san admitted that the code was the same that she used for her phone. If someone had been watching her closely, they could've picked it up. As for what the intruder had been looking for, Amari-san had no idea. I showed her how the closet and dresser had been rifled through, but Kudo-kun was quick to remind us that the refrigerator had been searched as well. He wasn't subtle about it, which only led to mounting horror on Amari-san's face as he realized that her idol had seen every nook and cranny of her apartment—and most of her underwear collection.

I suggested that Amari-san get something signed by Kudo-kun, at least while he was there, and that made her forget her embarrassment, but she was still so bashful around him.

Of course, Kudo-kun couldn't say no. He said he would sign anything she wanted—the typical sort of over-the-top promise that a celebrity makes for a fan he can't stand to disappoint. To think that the great detective could be cowed by a cute young woman who adored him—it was so ordinary.

While the autograph session was underway, I checked out Amari-san's washroom. I didn't think that the police would've missed something, but during the initial pass Inspector Yamato, Kudo-kun, and I had made, I hadn't actually gone inside. Naturally, I'd been there during casual visits, so it wasn't foreign to me. I'd even seen inside the medicine cabinet before, which was why I'd been surprised to hear that Amari-san's trazodone was kept there. I'd never seen anything like that before, but that day, while Amari-san tried on a signed hat from Kudo-kun, I opened the medicine cabinet and found the bottle of pills sitting there in plain sight, and I wondered if I only hadn't noticed the pills before or if Amari-san would hide them every time she had a friend over. Amari-san's prescription booklet was missing—still considered evidence by the police—so I couldn't flip through that. I made a mental note to ask Kudo-kun for the full list later.

I was halfway through the cabinets beneath the sink when Amari-san and Kudo-kun found me. Amari-san was wearing her signed hat, and Kudo-kun had an amused look on his face, as though the sight of me rummaging through someone else's cleaning supplies was funny. "Is there something wrong with her toilet bowl cleaner?" he asked.

I didn't think there was. I was just being thorough. Isn't that what detectives do?

Kudo-kun stared at me silently with a barely suppressed grin. He was laughing with his eyes. I glared at him, but it didn't help. Amari-san was looking embarrassed again, so I suggested we start walking through Amari-san's day.

Amari-san's mood shifted when she heard that. She pulled down on the bill of her hat, and she led the two of us back into the bedroom. She sat down on the bed, opened the drawer, and thumbed through a spiral-bound notebook. It was her mood diary, she explained. It was her daily log of how she felt, whether she thought her medications were working, bad dreams, flashbacks, and anything else that might affect her mental state. "Before," she said, "I'd go day after day and not really know if I was doing any better or worse. Doctor Hayami suggested I keep a diary, and it helped a lot."

Amari-san even had an entry from the morning she'd disappeared. It was short: _Bad dream this morning. Woke up late. Talk about this later._ She had no memory of this dream, and she couldn't guess what it had been about.

After jotting down her dreams in the mood diary, Amari-san would've tried to get ready for her train. She would've hastily changed and headed to the washroom to brush her teeth and take her meds—-which reminded Amari-san that she probably had been without her meds for over 24 hours. She unscrewed the cap on the pill bottle and tapped it to loosen the pills. It was a practiced gesture, and she swallowed the medicine without hesitation.

Kudo-kun was eager to head to the train, so much so that he was halfway out the door before Amari-san had had a chance to make herself nice. She'd been abducted and then kept in the hospital. Going back to her apartment had been one thing, but he expected her to rush back out, into the world, without getting cleaned up?

Kudo-kun looked aghast, saying he didn't mean to be insensitive, but of course Amari-san took Kudo-kun's side. She tried to convince me to go easy on him. "It's only natural that Kudo-san is focused on the case. Don't be rude, Shiho-chan."

You can be rude to children and small animals—to creatures that deserve politeness and respect and who are incapable of defending themselves. You could not be rude to Kudo Shinichi. It was disappointing that Amari-san didn't see that, but at the same time, I was relieved that she was back to her old self in that way—too blinded by her admiration of Kudo-kun to worry about the situation she was in.

* * *

From Amari-san's apartment, we headed back to Iiyama. We believed that Amari-san met her mother for lunch at a German cafe near Amari-sensei's school first, and so, as before, Amari-san met her mother at the restaurant—with Kudo-kun and me as chaperones. While the four of us ate, we asked a manager to come by and help corroborate the timeline. He was puzzled at first, but Amari-sensei gave him permission to bring up their lunch receipt, which told us not just the time Amari-san and her mother closed their check (12:31) but also what they had that day (one vegetarian schnitzel and one pork schnitzel). We asked for the same server who'd waited on Amari-san and her mother, but the manager said that server was off that day, and we'd have to catch up with him later. Kudo-kun still asked for some contact information, out of an abundance of caution.

Kudo-kun had managed to uncover some simple facts, but as far as jogging Amari-san's memory, we made little progress. Kudo-kun and I had feared that Amari-sensei might not speak freely in front of us, but once we sat down and ordered, Sensei walked us through what happened that day in great detail. "We sat over there," she recalled, nodding at a table by the window. "I told Kagura to get some meat, but she wouldn't."

"I _like_ the veggie schnitzel, Mom," Amari-san said.

"I know you do, but this is such a nice place. It's a shame not to get some meat while you're here, especially since I was paying."

"I'd rather enjoy myself when I'm with family and get meat when I have to impress someone."

"You don't want to impress me?"

"Should I?"

Kudo-kun was quiet, letting Amari-san, Amari-sensei, and I talk for most of dinner, and by the time our entrees arrived, I began to suspect that he was puzzled. Amari-sensei wasn't exactly friendly—she still held some lingering resentment against Kudo-kun—but she was curious about me and my friendship with her daughter. I got the impression that Amari-san hadn't said much about me, but far from being quiet about it, Amari-san told her mother freely about how I'd helped her get started in Professor Noto's group and that I was the one who had intended to bake a cake with her for the weekend.

"How much did you cook together while you were growing up, Amari-san?" Kudo-kun asked.

Amari-san was surprised with the question. "Oh, quite a lot! I still can't make her curry rice right, but I keep working on it."

"Did you consider getting help from your mother for this cake you were supposed to bake?"

"No, how would I get a cake from Iiyama to Suzaka?" asked Amari-san.

Kudo-kun nodded, and he turned his attentions to the mother. "You're very busy with schoolwork and all that. Would you have even had the time to help?"

"I trust that Kagura could handle a cake, with or without me," Sensei said, "but if she'd asked for my help, of course I would've done what I could. It was a Friday night, after all."

Kudo-kun mulled over that answer while we ate, and the change in mood put off Amari-san, who realized that Kudo-kun's questions had been more than small talk. We ate our main courses in silence, but Kudo-kun's eyes never left the Amari family. When Amari-san dropped her fork, Amari-sensei wiped her own clean, passed it over to Amari-san, and asked the server for another. Amari-san seemed annoyed with that. She didn't accept the new fork, using the old one instead.

* * *

Our next stop was Doctor Hayami's house. The doctor wasn't seeing patients that day, but knowing that Amari-san would want information about her session, he'd kept a recording of their appointment and made a copy to give to her. Going out of his way for Amari-san's sake, the doctor invited Amari-san inside his study to talk for a little while about what they'd discussed. Kudo-kun and I decided to stay outside. It was approaching twilight, and the late-summer heat was ebbing away, leaving us with pleasant and comfortable evening. Kudo-kun couldn't wait more than a minute before asking my opinion of the situation. What did I think of Amari-san's behavior? Was this typical for her?

I'd thought Amari-san would be weak in the knees being around him, but she'd been subdued ever since we'd seen her in the hospital, and she was probably wary because it was obvious what Kudo-kun was trying to do: corner her into admitting that she'd covered for her mother's unjustified murder of her father.

"That's one theory," Kudo-kun said, "but it's not the only theory."

What other theory was there? If Amari-sensei hadn't murdered her husband—if no one at least _thought_ it was a possibility—then what was the point of all this? Why else would someone abduct Amari-san?

"Who knows?" he said with a shrug.

Who knows? Who _knows_? That was his job! He was supposed to know! The last thing I wanted to hear from him was that he'd conned us all into eating at a nice German restaurant just because he wanted to!

"Listen," he said, "let's say you walk into a pool hall and you see a man at the nearest table with the cue ball and the 8-ball as the only balls left. It looks like he would have an easy shot. Do you think he's about to win?"

"I would," I said.

"You ordinarily would," Kudo-kun went on, "because you're accustomed to 8-ball pool, and because only the 8-ball is left on the table, you'd rule out another game such as 9-ball, but on a closer look, you realize that this man is an older billiards player, and the game he's playing isn't 8-ball. His opponent takes all the balls from the pockets and racks them with the apex of the rack left empty. They're playing straight pool, and you have no way of knowing whether the shooter is close to winning. He has to try to sink the 8-ball and also break up the new rack to get an opportunity at another good shot. The same situation—seeing a pool player with an 8-ball and a cue ball lined up for a good shot—can mean wildly different things depending on context." He nodded toward Doctor Hayami's house. "Amari-san is hiding something; I'm sure of that, but what I don't know, and what I'd like to understand before I make an accusation, is the _context_."

Up to that point, Kudo-kun's read on Amari-san was that she'd been deeply shaken by her abduction. He wondered if her amnesia was real or merely convenient forgetting that any victim might be prone to. Having watched Amari-san and her mother together, he thought there was some distance between them, but they were still family, and they weren't estranged in any meaningful way. If Amari-san had covered for her mother and resented it, why did she have lunch with her mother the day she was abducted? If Amari-san had nothing to hide, then why was she being so evasive? She hadn't been eager to help Kudo-kun with the investigation. There was still something missing, some vital piece of context that would clue Kudo-kun in about the nature of the game we were playing.

Either way, Kudo-kun was intent on solving that mystery—the mystery of what really happened between Amari-sensei and her husband. I thought it was sad, in a way. To get justice for Amari-san, he would have to pry into her most vulnerable moment. Did that bother him, even just a little?

"You have to find the truth first," he argued, "before you can decide how make things just."

So he would pursue it wherever it led, no matter what kind of damage it would do to Amari-san. After all, just because she'd been a victim of a plot didn't mean she was innocent, not in his mind.

"You have an answer for everything," I told him. "Did your fiancée ever get tired of that?"

Kudo-kun seemed taken aback, and I thought, just for a minute, that I might have made him angry. He looked at me with his cool, analytical stare; took a moment to think about his answer; and said, "I think she was used to it. If she was annoyed with it, she never said anything."

"She was wise then," I told him.

He raised an eyebrow, and I went on, saying,

"A famous Greek philosopher once said, 'Through silence, the discretion of a man is known, and a fool, keeping silent, seems to be wise.'"

Kudo-kun pointed out that my own quote meant I didn't know if his fiancée was actually wise to keep silent. She may have been foolish and just seemed wise. I asked if he thought she'd been foolish, and he said _no_. Maybe, because he could say that, she had been foolish after all—in keeping silent about things that had come between them, or in moving on from someone who so clearly took her complaints to heart.

* * *

When Amari-san was finished with her doctor, we headed back to Iiyama to finish retracing her steps. Kudo-kun asked her if she remembered anything yet, but she hadn't. She did tell us a little about her session with the doctor—at least, what he'd told her had happened. Amari-san had been worried about her work recently. Her research had been promising, but she had a paper to write about it, and she'd worried she needed a more thorough overview of the literature for context.

"Is that all it was?" I asked her.

She looked away. "That was part of it." Seeing my face, she tried to assure me. "Please don't worry. It wasn't anything serious, really!"

It wasn't anything serious, and I shouldn't worry. I knew her, after all. I was her friend. I should've been able to tell if there was something going on with her, if there had been something to worry about.

I learned over the course of that afternoon that Amari-san was very good at hiding what she really felt about some things. I saw that again when we went to the flower shop. Amari-san didn't remember picking up her bundle of purple hyacinths or how the flower shop manager had tried to ask her out, but when Kudo-kun informed her of that, she wasn't surprised. She seemed to feel a little sorry for the manager. "He seems nice," she told us, but she wasn't head-over-heels for him, and short of that, she didn't have any plans to date until she was finished with her degree.

I asked her if she wouldn't even make herself available for her favorite detective, but she dismissed the idea out of hand, without even telling me off for the embarrassing joke. "I look up to Kudo-san," she said, correcting my misconception. "I'm not in love with him." She only realized then how rude that might've been to say with him in earshot, but Kudo-kun wasn't offended. Even so, Amari-san spent the next ten minutes apologizing while we were on the way to the graveyard. She started reciting details from every case he'd worked for the past year as proof of her commitment as a fan. Kudo-kun tried to get her to stop after going back two months just for her own sake, but she wouldn't have it.

That she could go so quickly from over-the-top fan to a calculating woman who had plotted out the course of each day—and her future, her whole life—in a heartbeat was still jarring to me, and I didn't understand it until Kudo-kun asked her how she'd become a fan of his. "I know I'm awesome and everyone should want to know more about me," he began, clearly enjoying himself, "but what made you interested in someone like me?"

I'd heard the story many times, so I wasn't really paying attention at the time. I could recite Amari-san's whole spiel in my sleep: Kudo Shinichi had been away from the spotlight for nearly a year, but he came back into the spotlight when he helped solve a legendary cold case, the disappearance of the eccentric billionaire Karasuma Renya. As Kudo-kun went on to single-handedly solve a dozen murders in the next month, going all over Japan to help the police with cases, Amari-san grew fascinated with his theatrical persona: the cool manner in which he would sniff out the facts of even the most complex crime, the surety with which he would spell out the truth for all to hear, and the lengths he went to for the sake of finding justice for the aggrieved. His cleverness made her feel that she could always find the answer in a complex situation, no matter how buried in irrelevant details it might be. That's why she became a fan.

That's where I thought the story ended, but Amari-san kept going. Her fascination with Kudo-kun's talents was more than simple admiration. It spoke to her deeply, on a personal level. Just as Kudo-kun must've taken months to unravel the disappearance of Karasuma Renya, Amari-san had been working on a case of her own for years already: the reason her father attacked her mother that one spring day.

"I even thought of writing to you about it," she admitted to him as we pulled up to the graveyard. "I knew you wouldn't know anything so specific about brain anatomy or biology, but I thought that, maybe because you'd bring a different perspective, you'd be able to find something that the doctors missed." She slapped her cheeks with both hands and sighed. "I spent a month trying to write that letter before it was silly."

"I couldn't help you," said Kudo-kun, "so you decided to look into it yourself?"

Amari-san looked back at me briefly before answering. "Yeah," she said. "I became a little obsessed with it, and I thought, well, if I'm going to be thinking about this so much, I might as well put it all to use!"

She became interested in neuroscience. That led her to Professor Noto and to me.

"Did you feel like you should've known, or that your mother should've known?" asked Kudo-kun.

"I don't know," Amari-san admitted. "I look back on it almost every day, and every time I look back, it seems a little different. I wonder if my dad's shouts were really as angry as I thought they were. I wonder if Mom really looked at him and could've recognized that something was wrong. I wonder if I should've seen it in his eyes…" The memory became too painful for her there, and it was all she could do to gently place a new bundle of purple hyacinths at her father's grave. Her hands were shaking a little, but the flowers weren't worse for it.

Amari-san didn't remember anything new thanks to us. Instead, as the light was fading and as Kudo-kun tried to get us to go back to his rental car, I looked back to see her still standing in front of her father's grave. There was an expression of great uncertainty on her face, but instead of what you might expect from a painful experience, her eyes were fully open, as though she had to keep seeing just to maintain a picture of this place in her head, and if she closed her eyes, it might all vanish from her mind.

I felt I could relate to Amari-san in that moment. I closed my eyes, and try as I might, I couldn't imagine her expression, even though I'd just seen it. After two years of looking into the next cubicle and seeing her cheery smile, the expression she wore at her father's grave was totally unfamiliar to me.

* * *

Though daylight was fading, we still had one more stop on our tour of where Amari-san had been the day of her kidnapping: the Ohara family resort. That time, we found a patrol car standing watch at the gate to the abandoned section of property. Kudo-kun stopped by and notified the officers that we were going up to the crime scene, and they waved us on.

Amari-san found the idea that she'd been held captive there puzzling. It wasn't a particularly isolated part of the grounds—in her mind—but knowing that her grandmother wanted to sell that section of the resort, and seeing how the road had been blocked off, she could see how someone might stay unnoticed for a while. She knew the area quite well, having once learned to ride horses there as a child. She'd even helped Professor Noto stay there once, at a discount, since the professor liked to ski.

The property had deteriorated since she'd last seen it—or at least, since the last time she remembered seeing it. There was a hole in one of the walls of the stables, and some weeds had started to grow over the immediate area. I hoped that the unusual sights, sounds, and smells would jog her memory, but she walked through the whole place like it was her first time seeing it in years, not just a few days. We showed her the stable where she'd been chained up and the place where the bucket of urine had been. It sickened her; it made her uncomfortable, and she had to wonder why. Why would someone take her captive?

That's when Kudo-kun explained to her about the pushpin and the photograph we'd found—the photograph of her father's body on the coroner's slab. Why would someone kidnap her over that?

Amari-san looked around the stable where she'd been held. She even pulled on the pipe where she'd been chained up, but if she thought she had to remember in order to give Kudo-kun an answer, it didn't help. She didn't remember anything, so she couldn't say.

"Then what can you say?" I asked her. "Never mind what happened Friday and Saturday. What really happened to your father?"

Amari-san shrank from my forcefulness. "I told you…"

She hadn't told us. Did she think we wouldn't figure it out? Kudo Shinichi was a world-class detective, and she knew that. She was a fan!

"I told you," she insisted, "we didn't do anything wrong."

If my outburst had surprised her, that feeling hadn't lasted long. She wasn't budging, but she was trembling. Her heart rate was elevated, and she was breathing visibly. She was like a gazelle backed up to the edge of cliff with a lion standing in its way.

Kudo-kun cleared his throat and suggested we head back. Amari-san and I followed him without a word.

It was getting late, so while Kudo-kun obviously had more questions, we decided it was best to meet again in the morning. We dropped Amari-san off at her apartment first. I offered to help her get settled for the night, but she insisted she was all right and she didn't need any help. Though she nodded in gratitude for her favorite detective in the world, she couldn't smile for him, and certainly not for me.

As Kudo-kun turned the car around to take me back to my apartment, he asked me if I had any idea whether Amari-san might've started to remember something but kept it to herself. If he'd asked me something like that a week before, I could've answered him with certainty. That night, I wasn't so sure.

Kudo-kun thought I was letting my doubts get to me. It was obvious, in his mind, that Amari-san was used to projecting a good mood in front of others. "That's not always meant to be a mask," he pointed out. Sometimes, forcing oneself to act cheerful opens one up to others. It wouldn't have surprised him at all if Amari-san had been disciplined enough to do just that. If she hadn't, she might've withdrawn from other people and ended up even more at the mercy of her bad memories and depression. People who maintain that kind of performance often lose themselves in the role. From acting extroverted and friendly, they actually become extroverted and friendly. Just because Amari-san had been different toward me that day didn't mean that was the "real" her. It could've been just a different side of her.

"So," I said to him, "did you really become a famous detective just by acting clever?"

You might expect that a confident sleuth would brush off that remark and sing his own praises, bragging that he'd read the collected works of Doyle ten times over before he was in high school or something like that, but Kudo-kun didn't bother trying to impress me. His response was simply, "You're not funny."

For the record, I'm very funny. I'm a charming, intelligent, fashionable, and attractive woman. Kudo-kun was lucky to have me in the same car as him. Naturally, he didn't appreciate any of that. I told him so, but being the rude neanderthal that he was, he rolled his eyes—which you absolutely shouldn't do while on the road. Kudo-kun had no sense whatsoever about safe driving.

We pulled up to my apartment and went over the plans for the next day. Amari-san had told us little that we didn't already know. Kudo-kun wanted to understand what she and Amari-sensei could be hiding. From there, we'd have to figure out who could've wanted that information. If Amari-san couldn't or wouldn't help us, he'd do it himself, and though it was already late, Kudo-kun figured he wouldn't want to rest much until he'd at least looked into it. I thought that was understating things. There was a nagging uneasiness in his eyes. It must've been the same look that his precious fiancée had struggled with over the course of their relationship.

"Let's get it figured out then," I said, closing the door and getting back in the car.

"How?"

"I don't know how," I said. "Let's go somewhere, get working on this, and figure it out."

Kudo-kun looked out the driver-side window. There wasn't anywhere to park.

"You can park back at your hotel, can't you?" I said. "Let's go there."

"Come on. You should get some rest."

"I'm fine."

"Are you?"

I cocked my head. "Are you nervous about taking a woman up to your hotel room?"

Kudo-kun narrowed his eyes, but he shifted the car into gear without a word.


	10. An Evening at the Metropolitan

The detective was staying at the Metropolitan Hotel, which overlooked Nagano Station. It was a mammoth complex with six different restaurants and amenities that would make even the richest clientèle impressed. When I heard Kudo-kun was staying there, I thought he must've been looking to light some money on fire, or that in his hurry to get to Nagano, he'd picked the most convenient place to stay, price be damned. It was a slight surprise to me, then, that when we arrived at the Metropolitan, Kudo-kun refused valet service, preferring to park his rental himself. I asked him about it, and Kudo-kun felt sure that there were plenty of other people who would ask for valet parking.

What Kudo-kun did need was the services of the Metropolitan's concierge. He'd come suddenly to Nagano with little more than the clothes on his back. Because of that, he'd arranged for a suitcase to be sent to the Metropolitan, so he could stay as long as he needed to for the case. The concierge was one of those impeccably helpful people, smiling sweetly for the famous Kudo Shinichi just because he graced her with his presence. How awkward she must've felt when Kudo-kun opened his suitcase right in front of her just to make sure it hadn't been tampered with!

"Is there anything else I can do for the two of you?" she asked, puzzled.

Kudo-kun looked up at her, equally bewildered. "Two of us?"

"She's talking about me," I told him, and I looked to the concierge. "Would you have someone send up a bathrobe and a toothbrush?"

The concierge smiled broadly. "Of course, miss."

Kudo-kun was flustered about the whole thing, wondering what on earth I was thinking, but I reasoned that we might be studying the evidence until quite late, and I hadn't had time for anything but a quick shower since Friday night. The last thing I wanted was to feel gross and sticky. Just what did he think I meant?

He wasn't amused with this answer, but he accepted it. In fact, he went back to the concierge and asked if she could arrange for some late night shopping. If I felt the need to take a bath, it seemed only fair that I would have a change of clothes. No one likes to change back into the same clothes one was wearing before—and definitely not the same set of underwear.

The concierge was getting a little suspicious, and I wondered if anyone had ever asked her to buy clothes as part of her job, but she took the request in stride, and Kudo-kun offered some extra money to make it worthwhile. All she needed was information on what sizes I would need.

"Here, I've written it down for you," said Kudo-kun, handing her a folded scrap of paper.

The concierge looked back at him, wide-eyed and thoroughly embarrassed on my behalf.

"I didn't write it down wrong, did I?" he asked.

The concierge let me look at the slip of paper. Everything was right, down to the last centimeter—even my bust size! I held it up and glared at him. "Explain!"

He looked back at me with one eye half-open. "I mean, I'm a detective."

For any wannabe "detectives" out there, let's be clear about one thing: that is _not_ an explanation.

* * *

Kudo-kun's suite spared no expense, and even he was unaware of some of its amenities. I looked around and discovered a jacuzzi, which I turned on just to see how it worked. The noise made Kudo-kun come running from the main room, demanding to know what that sound was. To be fair, he hadn't done much in that room except for sleeping, but I did wonder—if he spent a week there alone, would he notice the jacuzzi? Probably not. Kudo Shinichi was the type to care most about a good mystery, whether real or fictional, and to blot everything else out of his mind.

Case in point: while I'd been looking around, Kudo-kun placed his laptop on the coffee table and brought up the files on the death of Amari-san's father. "You ready?" he said.

Sitting beside him, I nodded, and we began.

The first piece of evidence was Amari-sensei's call to emergency services. "Hello," she'd said to the operator. "My husband's been stabbed with a pair of scissors. He's lost consciousness. He's bleeding badly—there's blood everywhere." Amari-sensei's tone was calm and deliberate. Even while describing the situation, she didn't sound like she had just been in a fight with her husband, or that she'd just dealt him a lethal blow. In the background, there were faint sounds of crying, and Amari-sensei shushed her daughter once while talking with the dispatcher. Sensei's story for the dispatcher was simple: she'd been out in the garden when her husband came out and started arguing with her. Rather than continue where the neighbors could hear, she'd gone back inside. They'd kept arguing, and he became violent and agitated, throwing her tools around and bending a hand trowel out of shape. The commotion caught the attention of their daughter, and the father, Ohara-san, threw the warped trowel at her, striking her across the face. It was at that moment that Amari-sensei pulled a pair of garden shears from her bags of tools and stabbed her husband once in the back.

Amari-sensei's story was clear and concise, and that didn't change even when she was taken in for questioning. The police detectives tried to get more context for what had happened, and Amari-sensei told them freely about Ohara-san's escalating behavior, which had started with irritability and unusual episodes of anger that would abate rapidly. That had started within two months before the fatal incident. Still, Amari-sensei hadn't suspected that her husband would turn violent. She'd blamed his emotions on stress from work and had thought that if things got better, he would be back to normal. In her telling, it was his violence not just toward her but toward her daughter that was the last straw. She did it to protect her daughter. That was all.

What bothered Kudo-kun about it was that the recollections of Amari-sensei and Amari-san after the fact were too similar. Their stories right up to the point Ohara-san threw the hand trowel at his daughter made sense. There were slight discrepancies: Amari-sensei remembered her husband yelling, "Don't talk to me like that, Kagura!" while Amari-san remembered him saying, "Don't talk _back_ to me like that, Kagura!" Those sorts of discrepancies were expected and natural. What they described afterwards was not: they both agreed that Ohara-san went over to his daughter to scold her for crying, that he grabbed her by the wrists, and that only then did Amari-sensei stab him. Both statements used the same language. Amari-san was "afraid for her life"—Amari-san said so, and Amari-sensei said her daughter looked that way. It wasn't conclusive, but it was consistent with the idea that Amari-sensei had coached Amari-san about what to say regarding those last moments in the father's life.

Those inconsistencies might've been caught by disciplined and thorough detectives, but based on the police reports, the officers assigned to Ohara-san's death were anything but thorough. The investigation had been closed quickly, with Amari-sensei going free after the initial holding period without facing charges. Kudo-kun grew irritated reading those notes. "Just because you think it would be hard to prove something doesn't mean you don't bother trying!" he yelled at his laptop screen. "And these people call themselves detectives."

"Not many people meet your lofty expectations," I pointed out.

Kudo-kun insisted it wasn't about expectations. He knew that he shouldn't expect everyone to be as brilliant as he. What frustrated him was that, from reading that police report, he got the impression that the detectives just didn't care. There were clear reservations about Amari-sensei's story, but the detectives and their supervisor never followed up on those doubts. Maybe they didn't have time or resources to do so. Maybe they had other cases that had clearer leads to follow. There were several possible explanations, but had Kudo-kun been in their place, he would've written down plainly that the case shouldn't be closed. Even if it couldn't be solved, it shouldn't be closed.

It was no surprise, though. Just as there were only so many people as brilliant as him, there were also only so many people who cared as much as he did. His passion for unravelling the unknown was a key ingredient to his success, arguably as key as his knack for solving cases. If he was going to go through life continually disappointed by how other people failed to pursue mysteries with the same enthusiasm he had, then he was only making things hard on himself. Instead, he should've been proud that he had that energy and drive. It was special.

I told Kudo-kun all that, and he seemed taken aback. He became quiet and thought about what I'd said for a few moments, and he asked me if I'd ever felt the same way. I could say that there was only one time in my life in which I'd really wondered what I should do with myself, but I found some inspiration, and that inspiration led me on the path to the person I'd become. I thought that was only natural. Everyone has doubts from time to time.

"Was that after the Organization?" he asked.

Kudo-kun was doing that annoying thing he liked to do—asking questions that were painfully on-the-nose. Luckily, I didn't have to answer him right then. There was a knock on the door. The concierge had sent someone up with the clothes we'd asked for—some fashionable pieces from Fusae's new clothing label—along with a set of toiletries and soaps.

"I'm using your shower," I told him.

"Are you seriously doing this?" he asked.

"I feel gross, so yes."

"You're dodging the question!"

In my opinion, I wasn't dodging the question so much as ignoring it.

The suite had a nice shower, but though I was able to feel cleaner, it wasn't relaxing or enjoyable. The hot water and soap stripped away all the built-up oils from the past thirty-six hours. They gave me time to reflect, both on Kudo-kun's question and Amari-san's circumstances. As I stood in Kudo-kun's shower, I felt sure we were on the way to proving that Amari-san's account of her father's death was a lie, that she and her mother had colluded to deceive the police and that new direction she'd chosen for her life after that, as well as the lingering depression and anxiety she felt from that, stemmed from the weight of that lie. She'd been carrying that secret heavily in her heart for years, knowing that her friends would never look at her the same way if they knew what she'd done and why she'd done it, but that's how people are. Everyone has to sit at the table of life with the cards they were dealt and play accordingly—raise, check, or fold.

The clothes the concierge had bought were quite nice. I'd have to find a way to repay Kudo-kun for them. I didn't like the idea, but it was better than owing him indefinitely.

When I was finished, I found that Kudo-kun had been studying the autopsy report, but he was easily distracted. As soon as I came out of the bathroom, his nose perked up. "What is that smell?" he asked. "Shampoo?"

It probably was. I'd added a note for the concierge to get a particular shampoo—something I'd always wanted to try but never had thought practical to buy.

Kudo-kun looked up from the laptop, distracted by my shampoo. He asked me what was in it, but I wasn't telling, and as far as I was concerned, if he went into the bathroom to find out, that would've been him admitting defeat. If he wanted to find out, he'd have to use his nose.

He was up for the challenge, standing up in front of me with an intense look on his face. He put his hands on my shoulders, leaned around me, and sniffed.

"It smells like ginseng…and oranges?"

He said that like it was the last thing that would've occurred to him, but as usual, he was right. As far as I knew there were no actual oranges involved, but I thought the same thing. "You should try that with someone you like," I told him. "It might be a good icebreaker."

Kudo-kun stared at me. His hands came off my shoulders gently.

"Just kidding," I said, and that was enough to keep him from from getting too flustered. I really was impressed he smelled the ginseng in it. It wasn't something I'd noticed or that I could pinpoint even if I had.

"You smell hundreds of different substances in my line of work," he said, passing off the skill as nothing special, and he took another look at my hair. "You gonna keep that shampoo?"

I did plan to.

"That's nice," he said, and he moved his laptop over so we could both see the screen. While I'd been in the shower, Kudo-kun had been poring over the forensics. The injuries to Amari-sensei and Amari-san were consistent with their stories, but something odd about Ohara-san's wound was that the coroner had found traces of glue and paper in the wound—traces that matched those on the shears. We definitely had the right weapon, but Amari-sensei had repeatedly called them _garden_ shears when it looked like they hadn't been used for gardening at all, or at least not right before they killed her husband. The investigators concluded that Amari-sensei had used them for something else previously and they'd been unused since, but that didn't sit well with Kudo-kun, and I felt that an avid gardener like Amari-sensei would've had more specialized tools. In an inventory of her toolbag, the police had found exactly that: a pair of scissor-like blades with a spring and longer handles for cutting twigs and small branches. In the heat of the moment, she might not have had the foresight to use a more lethal weapon, but those shears would've killed her husband much more quickly, if she'd thought to use them.

The shears didn't give us a clear reason to doubt Amari-sensei's story, but in looking at Ohara-san's wound more closely, I felt that the placement of the wound was unusually low. It was a sharp force wound with a downward angle, indicating that Ohara-san had been stabbed by an overhand strike, but the wound was in the middle of Ohara-san's back. I was only a centimeter taller than Amari-sensei, and Kudo-kun was about the same height as Ohara-san. We posed for a bit with me striking at him from various distances, but the angles were all wrong. You can stand further away and reach at someone to still strike with a downward angle lower on their body, but in the case of Ohara-san, the scissors had been held closed—and therefore perpendicular to the forearm that had stabbed him. The closer the attacker stood, the larger the angle between the scissors and Ohara-san's skin, up to 90 degrees at the closest range. Someone aiming for a particular spot might change that calculation, but if we assumed that Amari-sensei was aiming nowhere in particular, it didn't make sense. She would've had to stoop or bend unnaturally to make a stab wound that low on her husband's body with a near-perpendicular angle. The only natural way it could've happened was if she were much, much shorter.

The scissors' handles were clean. There were no fingerprints on them. At the time, no one thought that suspicious because Amari-sensei had been wearing gloves, but that didn't explain the lack of blood spatter. Kudo-kun thought we might want to see how much shorter I'd have to be for the angles to work out, but I didn't see any point. It was late, I was tired, he'd still have to drive me home, and I didn't think we'd learn anything more. I packed up my old clothes in the bag the concierge had given me and let that Sunday come to an end.

* * *

When my alarm went off the next morning, I was already awake. It was a Monday, and the traffic outside was loud and heavy. Ordinarily, I would've headed for the lab to pore over specimens and collect data, but that was no ordinary day. Kudo-kun had sent word asking me to bring Amari-san to the police, as they were pursuing a lead regarding how the culprit had obtained the photo of Ohara-san's autopsy. I asked him if he could pick her up instead, but he was already at the prefectural police headquarters. If it was a problem, he could ask Amari-san to stop by herself, but I insisted it was fine. Amari-san was my friend. Why should it be a problem?

"For someone so intelligent, you can be amazingly hard-headed," Kudo-kun wrote back to me on my phone. "I didn't think you'd get so wound up about Amari-san. I thought you could relate to her."

Relate to her, he said. He'd totally misunderstood the situation. There were a thousand reasons I couldn't relate to her. Despite what she'd been through, she'd seemed to know what she wanted to do with her life, and I'd never pretended to be cheerful and outgoing when I was actually serious and deliberate.

If I could relate, it wasn't because I'd seen family die right before my eyes. It would've been because I'd seen a friend look at me with wonder and worry that I wasn't the person she'd come to know. I'd been in hiding under an assumed name. I'd made some friends and a new life for myself, but the day came, one day, when my dear friend Yoshida-san took me aside on our way to school and asked me a question I couldn't ignore:

"You're not really Ai-chan, are you?" she'd said.

How had she figured it out? What had made her suspect? But in the end, none of that mattered. The danger was gone. The people I'd been running from were dead or behind bars. I had no more reason to hide the truth from her, and I couldn't, but I'll never forget the look on her face when she asked that question—a mix of worry and dread, a unique combination that comes not from the unknown but from the horrible certainty of a truth you can't ignore.

I told her the truth, in part because I couldn't stand that look on her face, and to my relief, her expression did change. The tension inside her vanished. She was sad about it. She had questions. Was I going to stay there? Was I going to continue living that life? I couldn't say that with certainty, and in the end, I did disappoint her, but once we were done with that conversation, my friend seemed relieved, and after school that day, she invited me to go out for sweets. I doubted it was a deliberate act. It was just in her nature to behave that way, but still, I remember it.

I realized then that I should've called Yoshida-san for advice, but it was still a Monday morning, and most reasonable people were in class or working, so I would only have been a distraction. Besides that, if I thought hard enough about what I should do, I should've been able to figure something out for myself.

I made a brief stop on my way to Amari-san's apartment, and when she opened the door, I offered her a box of pastries. She looked at me like I was crazy, but if you like chocolate even a little, you have to be a cold-hearted person to refuse a fresh chocolate croissant. I took one of them from the box and held it in front of her, and with a cautious, gentle touch, she took it from me and bit at the end.

I didn't need Amari-san to tell me anything more about what had happened between her, her mother, and her father on that one day. I knew enough already, and if she wanted to tell me sometime, I would wait for that. Kudo-kun had come to his own conclusions, and for the sake of finding Amari-san's kidnapper, he would share them with the police, but I could wait until Amari-san was ready to talk. I was her friend, after all, and like her, I was not all who I seemed, either.

That said, I would've been lying if I'd said I wasn't curious about one thing. "The scissors that killed your father," I began, "weren't garden shears. They were crafting scissors, and they were yours, weren't they?"

Amari-san looked past me with a faraway stare, and she nodded ever-so-slightly.

"I see," I said. "That's all I wanted to know."

She let out a heavy breath and perked up at that, and though we were supposed to meet Kudo-kun at NPP headquarters soon, she insisted she had to go back at get her trusty Kudo Shinichi "Only One Truth" baseball cap.

"Okay!" she said once she locked up her apartment. "Let's go solve the case, Shiho-chan!"

"Are we going to solve a case, or are you after another autograph?" I wondered.

She blushed, and she tightened the cap on her head. "The case comes first, of course, but if Kudo-san has some extra time, why not?"

* * *

While investigating how Amari-san's kidnapper had obtained the autopsy photos, Kudo-kun and Inspector Yamato had searched through public records requests and discovered that one Tsuruya Akiho had requested information about Amari-san's father. Tsuruya-san was an accountant at another resort, so we thought she might've known the Ohara family, but Amari-san had no knowledge of her, and Ohara-san, still in custody, pleaded ignorance, too. Tsuruya-san's motives weren't obvious, but her explanation for her involvement was thin: she claimed that her credit card had been stolen (how convenient!) and that the thief must've used her stolen card to pay for the public records request.

Inspector Yamato was skeptical, remarking that as alibis go, a stolen credit card was fairly weak, especially considering that Tsuruya-san had not reported the stolen card for two weeks, conveniently not noticing that she was missing a card for all that time. Tsuruya-san insisted that she didn't use her cards that much; they were for emergencies more than anything. As for how and where her card had supposedly been stolen, Tsuruya-san couldn't say. She went out one weekend and woke up after having had too much to drink. She'd assumed that she'd had a little too much fun and someone hadn't been so trustworthy.

"But they didn't take all your cards, or your purse?" asked the inspector.

Tsuruya-san had found that strange, too, once she realized it, but she'd thought that must've been the point. One card wouldn't be missed if it were seldom used.

"Let me get this straight," Kudo-kun said. "You went out one weekend. You had some drinks. Your memory of the night is fuzzy. The next thing you know…?"

"I wake up in bed. My ankle's killing me, and I'm wondering what the hell kind of fun I had."

"Your ankle?" I asked.

Tsuruya-san rolled up her pantleg and pulled down her sock, showing us a spot of chafing around her ankle. "Like someone chained me up to a post and I wasn't having good time," she explained. "I mean, I'm generally okay with that, so it wasn't a surprise—just a good time that wasn't so good, you know?"


	11. Reminiscence

Kudo-kun believed that, when confronted with _two_ victims of the same crime, selected for reasons unknown to us, the best course of action was to look for some areas of commonality. The victims must've been chosen because they met some criteria or fit a pattern—or at least, that's what naïve logic told us, but the new victim, Tsuruya-san, was in many ways Amari-san's opposite. Amari-san was chaste, foregoing romance while working on her degree. Tsuruya-san not only enjoyed regular hookups but did so with full approval and encouragement from her longtime partner, whom she had no plans to marry because they didn't believe in it. Amari-san was a scientist. Tsuruya-san had no single profession, having been a poet, songwriter, and activist at different times in her life. Though Amari-san couldn't remember what had happened to her during her abduction, the timeline of events for her was clear: she'd gone to visit her father's grave, stopping along the way to have lunch with her mother and to hold a regular psychiatric appointment. Tsuruya-san had no idea whatsoever of who she'd been with the night she'd been taken, where she might've gone, or what substances had been involved.

The only commonality between them was that they were women who'd been chained up by some unknown attacker and, presumably, drugged so that they wouldn't remember the experience. In fact, aside from her missing card, Tsuruya-san was unconcerned. If she'd lost some time and wasn't worse for the experience, what could she do about it? "You can't beam the memories back into my head," she remarked.

The police called Tsuruya-san's partner to see if he remembered anything more about the night of her abduction. His attitude wasn't much different from Tsuruya-san's, but he did remember something about that night. Tsuruya-san had come home already out like a light, having been dragged to their apartment door by a woman who'd claimed to be a friend of hers. Tsuruya-san's partner didn't know all her friends, so he'd been wary at the time, but the woman hadn't come into their home, so he'd dismissed his suspicions as unfounded.

Tsuruya-san didn't have any obvious reason to be targeted. She and her partner had little money to their names. She didn't have the best relationship with her family, but they weren't estranged, either. Lately she'd been making a narrow living as a freelance writer, mostly submitting articles to a variety of websites and news outlets regarding the Shinshu music scene, as well as taking on ghostwriting services for a client with a great sense of self-importance as a historian but no ability to craft a narrative.

Beyond that, we were no closer to figuring out why the culprit had targeted Tsuruya-san. Perhaps she'd been a target of opportunity—someone who wouldn't be missed, whom the kidnapper could test their methods on, or whose identity would be convenient to steal. Kudo-kun conceded those were possibilities, but he preferred to keep looking for some connection between Tsuruya-san and Amari-san, not wanting to overlook something that could be discovered with just a little more effort and time.

Effort and time—I couldn't spare much of those. As morning ticked over to afternoon, I received a message from Professor Noto asking if I was still glued to Kudo-kun's hip and what she should do with my experiments. Thankfully, one of my colleagues was in and could take care of the routine work, but it was an unsustainable situation. I couldn't keep working the case indefinitely, even if it was for Amari-san's sake, but I didn't want to let it go, either. Amari-san would forgive me, of course, but some people don't deserve to have their deeds go unpunished. If the people I'd worked for had all gone free, I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.

Kudo-kun thought I was being silly, of course. In his view, I'd spent five years of my life already on research and my degree. It didn't make any sense to jeopardize that for a strange case while seasoned professionals were working on it. "Unless you're having second thoughts about becoming a detective after all," he concluded, shooting me a smug look that I thought ironic, given he was so bold with his deduction while being 100% wrong. I know he was only trying to needle me because, for some reason, he thought that was worth his precious time. When he finally decided to be serious about the matter, he said that I could try to be logical as much as I liked, but if letting the case go didn't sit well with me, I would see it through to the end. That's the kind of person I was, in his opinion.

I reminded Kudo-kun that, unlike one of his suspects, I wasn't someone he could turn inside-out for his amusement, but putting that aside, I thought he was probably right. Sometimes, there are things that gnaw at you, and you just can't do anything about them. I knew that well. I'd been there before.

* * *

In Professor Noto's first e-mail to me, she wrote, "Our mutual friend at the NPA has told me about you. Your qualifications are suitable for my group. Make some time to visit Shinshu. We can do something with your talent and knowledge. No one else has the imagination to harness it properly."

It was about six months after the police had rounded up most of my former colleagues and decimated their operation. I was still getting used to the idea that I didn't have to look over my shoulder every time I went out, and while I found the offer intriguing, there were many obstacles to even entertaining the idea. Haibara Ai was still busy with school. She'd have to skip to see Shinshu University, and that didn't even begin to consider how I'd explain things to my adoptive father, Professor Agasa. Professor Noto is a professor, yes, but Professor Agasa is _the Professor_, and he always will be for me, even if his title is more honorary than anything else. The Professor was, in spite of his clumsiness and terrible lack of self-control, a sweet and wise man. He'd never had a family of his own before me, instead reaching out to inquisitive children to act as a mentor while they grew up. I really thought that giving up the name _Haibara Ai_—the alias he'd come up with just for me—was too much, but the Professor took it all in stride. He'd realized, even before I'd brought up the topic with him, that I'd been unhappy for some time. Once the ever-present threat of my old colleagues had been dealt with, it was only natural that I'd become bored with the life of an ordinary girl. School was trivial for me. The hardest I had to try was to avoid acing exams so I wouldn't stand out. My friend Yoshida-san was already sure I wasn't who I'd said I was, too. From that point on, it'd seemed inevitable that we would part—either when we finished school or when I became tired of living the lie. Still, I'd truly believed I could tough it out. I'd lived through enough exciting times as Miyano Shiho. Why did I need to go back to that?

It was on my twentieth birthday that I began to reconsider it. My friends threw a nice party, giving me the best cake they could put together. Of course, they didn't think I was twenty, but that was just a small lie, not one I gave any thought. It was that night that I took some time for myself to go through something I'd been saving for some time: my mother's last taped message for me. She'd recorded twenty tapes for me to listen to, knowing she might not be around for me as I grew up, and the last tape had been marked for my twentieth birthday. In her other tapes, Mother had told me some things about her research, and I'd expected to hear more about her work, but that last tape she'd reserved for something else: to tell me about my sister, my father, and herself; to ask me to work toward developing a passion in life; and to argue that, though she'd given up a lot to pursue her life's work, she didn't regret it, even knowing the people she'd worked with and the evil they'd done. She could no more renounce herself for that than she could throw away everything she'd learned and accomplished.

"But Shiho," she'd said on that tape, "if everything your father and I did comes to nothing, know that we tried hard because we believed in it, and if it ends there, that's all right, too. I wouldn't do any of that differently. We put all we could into it, and to look back and say we could've done more would be wrong. We couldn't have, so I don't regret it, and I hope you won't, either."

If only she'd told me that before I'd been forced to finish what they'd started—then I never have ended up in that position! Then again, Mother never thought the drug I'd worked on was a good idea. She'd called it a terrible thing that she'd helped develop only because _they_ were so interested in it. That "Silver Bullet" took them away from my sister and me, and they'd died before they could be done with it, never to finish the great work that they'd pinned all their hopes on. Of course, _they_ had never been that interested in my parents' pet project, so those dreams had been lost to the annals of time. Mother wanted me to pursue my own dreams, and it would be years before I could do that as Haibara Ai, if at all.

That night, I spoke with my contact at the NPA about Professor Noto. He vouched for her without hesitation. She'd helped find work for a few stray members of the Kuonji clan in Nagano after their syndicate had fallen apart. Someone like me—with a criminal past, but looking to go straight—would be right at home with her. Still, my contact was surprised I was looking for an opportunity. "Looking to follow in your mother's footsteps?" he'd remarked. "I wouldn't recommend that. It took her away from this world too early."

If I followed in my mother's footsteps, that was my business, and he could keep his blatant crush on my mother to himself. I made a note never to be too kind to young boys; they might carry a torch for me for the rest of their lives. Still, despite his doubts, Furuya-san had given Professor Noto a glowing recommendation, so I thought that was good enough to go meet her. Furuya-san wondered if I would ask someone else for a second opinion, but I didn't see the need.

The next day, I had the Professor call in sick for me, and I left the Professor's house for the first time in a long time as Miyano Shiho. It was an odd feeling, going out without my usual disguise. I'd waited long enough that all my friends would be in school, so I didn't have to fear running into them, but I still wondered what I would do if I did come across them.

I started to feel better once I got further from the house, and by the time I was at the train station, I was less worried about friends recognizing me than enemies. The NPA, the FBI, the CIA—they'd never found everyone who'd ever worked with our outfit. After a year, there were still a few stragglers at large, but they were all low-level enforcers who had no wider knowledge of the business and who weren't dangerous to me, or so my contacts thought. All the big fish had been caught or killed. Theoretically, I was safe, but that didn't keep me from looking over my shoulder all the way until I got on the train. Even then, on the ride up to Nagano City, I looked at every single person in the car, made notes of their demeanor, and tried to guess how likely it was that someone near me was an assassin I didn't know about.

Maybe Furuya-san was right. Stay in hiding a bit longer. Don't bother trying to go back to that other life. It didn't cost me much to maintain a disguise. After a few more years, it would be much more likely everyone who'd ever known me as Miyano Shiho would be too preoccupied with their new lives to come after me again. If I hadn't already boarded the train, I might've gone back home and forgotten all about that idea, but once I was in Nagano, I felt that I would draw more attention to myself if I just picked up a return ticket and turned back, so I left the station and made my way to Shinshu University.

The campus was not what I expected, with most of the buildings focused on more practical things, such as computer engineering or nanotechnology. It was on the east side of campus, in the Advanced Science and Technology Center, that Professor Noto had a few rooms all to herself. The professor's door was open, and when I knocked, she asked me to come inside without demanding to know who it was and why they were there. She was busy marking up a paper by hand, using red marker liberally. She slashed at it like an artist throwing paint at a canvas. No matter how much red ink she poured on that paper, she was never happy with it.

The professor made me sit there for five minutes until she was finished with that paper, which she derided as the work of abject hacks who wouldn't know one end of a burette from the other. Then, she filed it away with other papers she'd been reviewing, and we got down to business. She'd been ready for my arrival, and she knew a lot—too much—about me and my background. Apparently she'd once worked with someone who'd known my father, so that had given her a pretty good idea of what my family had been doing and what kind of work I'd been forced to do while growing up. Still, she wanted to know a lot about what I'd been through, and those were questions I hadn't prepared to answer. What happened? How did I escape? Was it true they'd been taken down thanks in part to Kudo Shinichi? The professor told me she just wanted to know where I was coming from, mentally and physically. "Everyone has a story," she'd said. "Now that I know yours, let's see if you have what it takes to write the next chapter."

She took me on a tour of her lab, introducing me to a few postdocs and graduate students. Contrary to my expectations, the professor only told them that I was visiting and that I was interested in applying, glossing over everything else about my background. She showed me the main lab area with the equipment, and we talked for some time about my previous work on induced apoptosis. I tried to tell her it wasn't good for anything but basic curiosity, but the professor thought differently. She didn't think much of its potential to promote longevity, but if tumors could be targeted with apoptotic agents, we would have a powerful weapon against many forms of cancer. I didn't realize until later on that Professor Noto was always like that—willing to use science that other people would have the sense to avoid, so long as she thought something good would come of it.

That was Professor Noto's drive: the opportunity to accomplish something. In her eyes, I was talented. There were few people like me who had learned so much already. All I had to do was look around. Her students were uncovering the secrets of memory through experiments with goldfish and mice. They were testing how people interface with virtual reality headsets and how hand-eye coordination translated to digital simulations. There was a great deal I could contribute to, and she welcomed the opportunity to count me among her students. "Would you rather go for a high school equivalency and apply to universities after a year or two of cram school?" she asked. "Or do you want to come with me, get in on a recommendation, and start working to make a difference right now?"

That was a false dichotomy in my eyes. I could still do something in my life if I waited, if I stayed as Haibara Ai and let nature take its course. Professor Noto conceded that my talents weren't likely to change, but they would fade a little with disuse. If I was willing to forget a bit of what I once knew, that was my choice. If I valued living a normal, innocent life for a while longer, that was my choice, but she didn't want me to underestimate it. She told me a story about a student she'd had a couple summers before. He was enthusiastic about research, but he couldn't deal with all the aspects of animal experimentation. He left, with Professor Noto promising to recommend him to other colleagues, as his issues didn't implicate his ability to carry out research in other labs. "I hear about how he's doing from time to time," she told me, "but it's been two years. If he walked in here, I wouldn't know him from your brother." The longer I waited, the more I would forget, and the more I would fall behind other people who had gone ahead of me. My parents' dreams had been lost already, and it had only been through some "luck" that the old research on APTX had been recovered to help develop antidotes. If not for a photo I kept on my phone, I might've forgotten what my sister looked like, too, given enough time.

While I thought she had a good argument, I was still on the fence. Professor Noto's attitude unsettled me for reasons I couldn't pinpoint at the time, and only once I started working with her did I realize how focused she was on her research, having only a few hobbies and either no interest in or no time for companionship. At the time, I just thought she was passionate about her work in a cool, driven manner.

It was thanks to those doubts, the ones I couldn't articulate, that I waited as long as I did before accepting the professor's offer, getting back in touch with her only weeks later. That day, I headed back home still thinking about what I'd seen and whether I could really give up being Haibara Ai for all that. The opportunity to do something with all I'd learned—to turn the evils I'd been through into something good—there was something poetic about it, something I thought my parents would've understood.

* * *

Looking back, perhaps I should've given it more time before accepting Professor Noto's offer. I didn't tell Kudo-kun that, of course, but when he asked me what I'd been daydreaming about, I admitted I'd been thinking back to my first trip to Nagano, and his mood turned sour. Apparently Furuya-san had spilled the beans to him that I was going to visit Nagano for an opportunity, and Kudo-kun had been offended that I'd asked Furuya-san alone to pull some strings for me. "You should've known better than to trust that guy whole-heartedly," said Kudo-kun. "You should've asked someone else for another background check."

And if I'd asked the master detective for a favor, what would I have gotten? Back then, he'd been a busy man, trying to get started with his first year of university, having his fiancée move in with him, and all that. I'm sure a request for a background check from me would've been a low priority. What would he have told me that I hadn't already known?

Kudo-kun didn't have an answer for that, which I thought was even more irritating than him being annoyed for no reason. In the end, what was done was done. I'd had a good life in Nagano, despite my initial worries, and while Professor Noto's attitude had taken some getting used to, I hadn't thought of it as a problem for a long time. I'd put everything I could into my research for years, taking breaks only to visit home for holidays. Taking a few days to work this case with Kudo-kun didn't mean I wanted to give up on my research forever. Sometimes a feeling just catches hold of you, and in that moment, you don't want to let it go.

My one regret was that I hadn't listened to that feeling before. I don't mean when I accepted Professor Noto's offer but when I had my doubts about her to begin with. If I'd listened to myself then, maybe I would've looked elsewhere. What I didn't realize at the time was that, though Professor Noto had few hobbies, she did like to go into the mountains to ski and hike. She belonged to a mountaineering club, and it was there that she met Tsuruya Akiho, second known victim of our kidnapper. Professor Noto and Tsuruya-san had been well acquainted ever since.


	12. Noto Minori

Noto Minori grew up in Chikuma, a southern suburb of Nagano City. She'd long had a fascination with nature, and according to one widely published profile, her parents thought it was more likely to find her covered in dirt than clean at any given time. They'd long believed she would pursue a career in ecology or agriculture. Instead, the future Professor Noto pursued a more lucrative path, focusing on laboratory work to unravel the secrets of the human mind. In four years in Tokyo, she studied with premier neuroscientists on the brain's responses to stress and trauma. She took that background to Kyoto, studying human subjects and memory formation. She worked two postdoctoral fellowships, in Sapporo and Nagoya, before accepting a professorship at Shinshu University. For two years she worked out of their main scientific campus in Matsumoto, and it was there she made her career—discovering the active ingredient for a new PTSD medication called _Leze_. Professor Noto's discovery gave her immense clout with the university. She leveraged that clout to build a new lab closer to home, in Nagano, and her consulting work with major pharmaceutical companies on Leze and related medications generated a consistent stream of income for her, enough that she could donate major portions of it to charitable causes, such as a small nursing home working with the disabled.

Professor Noto certainly wasn't using that money for herself. She maintained a small, avant-garde home near campus. It was unique but not as large or ostentatious as she could've afforded.

The professor was enjoying some takeout when Kudo-kun, the police, and I came knocking on her door. She was annoyed we'd interrupted her dinner, but she allowed us to come inside and question her while she ate.

Did she know Tsuruya Akiho? Yes, she did. They belonged to a mountaineering club together. She claimed not to be aware that Tsuruya-san had been attacked—not that that told us much, as Tsuruya-san herself hadn't been aware until that morning. They were not close friends, but Tsuruya-san had done some volunteering at the professor's nursing home. Tsuruya-san wasn't the only person she'd approached with the opportunity.

Kudo-kun seemed surprised. "She offered you a position?" he asked me.

I didn't remember any such thing, but Professor Noto recalled it quite clearly. It was in my first year at Shinshu. She'd given me a couple months to acclimate myself, and she'd asked me if I was looking for anything else to expand my life while I was pursuing my degree. She remembered I'd said _no_ at the time because I didn't want to be distracted, and she let the matter drop, thinking that I might not be suited to the role after all. I still didn't remember the incident, but I felt that I must've wanted to make sure I'd make forward progress with my research before branching out in life.

Professor Noto had approached Amari-san, too, but Amari-san had also declined, for similar reasons. None of that surprised her, and she'd made a point not to mention donating to the nursing home, feeling that it would be a conflict of interest and unduly pressure us to volunteer—as if not doing so would put us on her bad side.

"You wanted volunteers that much?" asked Inspector Yamato.

"I think it's important my students enrich themselves and find perspective," said the professor. She was interested in the home because it catered to patients with mental defects, memory loss, and other similar disorders. "The mind is a fragile thing," she explained. "You're taking a hundred different things for granted right now: that you can look at my face and remember who I am, that you can recall what I just said a minute ago, that you know your own name and what you had for lunch today. Seeing those people—as long as your mind is functioning properly, you don't forget that."

We asked where she had been when Amari-san and Tsuruya-san were abducted, even knowing that she had a good alibi for Amari-san. We found out that the weekend Tsuruya-san was abducted, Professor Noto had been hiking in Nozawa-onsen with a group of three other club members, so it wasn't likely she'd done anything herself. If she'd targeted Tsuruya-san and Amari-san, she must've hired someone to do it.

"Professor," I began, "what did you know about Amari-san and her father?"

The professor was unamused. "What are you implying? Yes, I knew that Kagura-kun had been working for a long time on how damage to certain regions of the brain influences behavior. I took it upon myself to look into her background. I needed to know if she had a general interest or wanted to work on something more specific."

"And you found out it was more specific," said the inspector.

Professor Noto nodded. "She had a specific motivation. That's why she was suited to work with me." She shot me a look. "Right, Shiho-kun?"

"Why is that?" asked Kudo-kun. "Why someone like Amari-san? Why someone like Miyano?"

"People with the right motivation make good scientists."

"Is Tsuruya-san motivated like that, too?" asked the inspector.

The professor laughed, and she waved her hand dismissively, as if Tsuruya-san were little more than a harmless gnat. "Aki doesn't have a scientific bone in her body. Her biggest motivation is to find a new way to get bent over."

"Did you know that Amari-san's account of what happened to her father wasn't the truth?" asked Kudo-kun.

Professor Noto frowned. "What are you talking about?"

The professor didn't seem to know—or just wouldn't admit to knowing—what really happened to Amari-san's father. Despite the detectives' best efforts, Professor Noto's story didn't change on that point, and while she had the means to stage a kidnapping, the exact motive still wasn't clear. Given Professor Noto's bulletproof alibis, the police wanted more evidence of wrongdoing before taking her in for questioning.

Inspector Yamato still had some ideas. If Professor Noto had hired someone to conduct this scheme for her, she would've had to use go-betweens or solicited services from known contractors online. The inspector invited us to come along and chat with some officers in their organized crime unit, but it was getting late, and Kudo-kun was hungry. One of the perks of being a private detective was that he could set his own hours, and he was desperate for a bowl of Shinshu ramen, so he offered to catch up with the inspector later. For my part, I felt out of place with the police, and I was hungry, too, so I went with Kudo-kun. He didn't know the area well, and if he had his mind too much on the case, he'd pick whichever ramen shop he ran into first and end up violently ill the next morning. That would be no way to solve a case.

Kudo-kun insisted he was perfectly capable of finding a good restaurant, in spite of my doubts, and that he was not distracted in the least. "If I were distracted," he argued, "I wouldn't have been able to manipulate the situation so I could get some time alone with you."

I frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"You're not worried about all this stuff with Professor Noto?"

Leave it to Kudo-kun to be ambiguous at the worst times. Well, of course I was worried. She was my advisor, but I'd have been lying if I'd said I'd trusted her completely. I always felt she had some sort of larger plan or goals in mind, and she'd never bothered to let me know what that was. I'd dismissed those concerns for various reasons. I'd thought she was only interested in furthering her career and was going about it in a secretive and hard-nosed way. She didn't care at all if people thought she wasn't gentle about that. That's why I'd thought she wasn't sinister. She'd seemed above petty deeds of revenge and loathed acting with malice.

Still, I had to admit that there'd been a lot more she'd been hiding than I'd ever thought.

"Anything weird she's working on? Anything unusual about her and new students?" asked Kudo-kun. "There must be something that makes this add up."

If there was, I couldn't say. Professor Noto had only Amari-san and me as students. She'd been actively courting another, and some of the other professors would loan their students to her for additional manpower, but that was all. She had a diverse set of interests. Amari-san's work concerned areas of the brain and changes in behavior associated with brain damage. I was looking at cancer in the brain and the challenge of delivering drugs past the blood-brain barrier. Knowing the professor's past work, she could easily be conversant in memory formation or behavioral changes associated with hormone fluctuations.

"But she picked Amari-san for a reason," said Kudo-kun. "Amari-san and you."

I shrugged. "She's peculiar."

"Come on, Haibara."

I wished he wouldn't do that. If someone we knew overheard him using that name, it would only cause problems. More than that, it was cheap of him, as if he thought he had power over me by using that name I'd never used in Nagano. _I know who you are and who you used to be,_ was what he was saying. _Don't forget that._ He would think that way. He would think I could forget.

"Come on what?" I shot back. "If there's something you want to know, you can ask me. I might even have an answer for you."

"Are you serious?"

"You're a detective, aren't you? Do you really need information from me?"

Kudo-kun glared at me with the second darkest look I could ever recall seeing on his face—something that seemed out of place even for his enemies. I hadn't thought I'd gone so far, but I didn't have the opportunity to ask him about it. We'd just come upon a ramen shop that I knew to be reputable, and Kudo-kun didn't bother to wait to see if I was following him. He bent under the curtain and pulled a stool out from the counter, not even bothering to lift it up. The stool scratched the floor and screeched like a wounded wildebeest, but the other customers didn't pay him any attention.

I'm not sure what came over me in that moment—maybe it was a touch of pity—but I sat down beside him and asked, more gently, "What's on your mind?"

He drummed his fingers on the counter, no doubt working through a thousand questions on his mind, searching for the one he wanted an answer to most. "You had a bad feeling about working for her," he said at last, "didn't you?"

That was an uncomfortable conversation because Professor Noto had known more than I'd expected anyone to be able to find out, but I'd never had the sense she was malevolent. It used to be when one of my former colleagues was around, I would know it in my bones. Professor Noto had never given me that impression, and as far as Kudo-kun was concerned, I'd never felt a hint of worry about her. He would overreact to that. He would go sniffing around where his nose didn't belong.

"Not in the least," I said.

Kudo-kun didn't buy that. As we sat with two bowls of Shinshu ramen—yellow in color and infused with barley—he scowled. "I don't get you," he said bluntly, which would've been a compliment had I been one of his famous cases and not a fellow human being trying to eat some ramen with him. "What game are you playing here? Professor Noto knows about you, but obviously Amari-san doesn't. Fine. I thought that was weird, but it's your business—up until you start throwing up those walls at _me_, acting like you never had a doubt about Professor Noto. What are you trying to do?"

"I'm just trying to move forward," I said. "You're giving me too much credit. You really think I could hide something from you?"

Kudo-kun didn't respond right away. He took his time separating his egg yolk from the whites, and he popped the cooked piece of yolk into his mouth and chewed. He stared across the counter, and only once he swallowed did he say,

"I am a detective, and I don't need information from you," he said, mixing his soup with his spoon. "If you want me to treat you like the suspects I question, that's fine, but you need to be careful. If Professor Noto really is responsible for this, you might want to find a safe place to stay."

"Oh, like your hotel room?" I said. "If you're looking for a new girlfriend, you should be more subtle!"

"I'm concerned for your safety. Book a room somewhere else if you have to. Stay with a friend—probably not Amari-san, since we know her security system's compromised. Stay at the Metropolitan if you want. It might be safer with me around to help watch your back. I won't tell you what to do because I know you won't listen, but you have options. You should think about them."

Kudo-kun's behavior didn't make sense to me. He was in a terrible mood, which didn't suit him, over something he shouldn't have been so worried about. Was I concerned about the developments with Professor Noto? Yes, of course. I intended to be careful, but if he was frustrated that he couldn't snap his fingers and become a knight in shining armor, then he had only himself to blame. He couldn't do everything, much as he might think otherwise, and you can see just how much of a complex he had about it.

"Don't strain yourself," I told him. "I know you feel like you have to solve every case and safeguard every innocent soul, but I'm not so innocent, and I'm certainly not some helpless princess desperate for protection."

He snorted. "Do you really think that's why I'm here—why I'm still here?"

It would've been easier if it had been. The last thing I needed was for Kudo-kun to show me a new side of himself like Professor Noto had, and though Kudo-kun focused on his soup, I wondered if he would ask me again to stay with him and if I'd have the discipline to say _no_. As straightforward as he seemed, Kudo-kun had an endless capacity to surprise me.

We wrapped up dinner, and I was tired, so I told Kudo-kun I'd go home for the night. He obviously didn't like my decision, but he wasn't going to waste his breath trying to change my mind. He settled for something else instead. "If you want to talk, you know where to find me," he said.

"You're so full of yourself, thinking I can't go a whole evening without talking to you," I told him.

"Yeah, yeah," he said, and he rolled his eyes.

* * *

When I got home that afternoon, I dug through my closet for an old bar device—the sort of thing that fits under the doorknob and looks like you've put a leg on your door, preventing anyone from opening it from the outside. I put on one of my foster father's multipurpose watches, which came with a built-in light, a tracking receiver, and other features of questionable legality. I checked that all the windows were locked, and I put flypaper in front of each of them as a messy surprise for a would-be intruder. I placed a small stone statue on the inside of my door and attached a ribbon to its base, so that when I left the next day, I could pull on it and make sure it sat flush with the inside—an old trick my handlers in the Organization had used in lieu of paying for alarm systems. Just for good measure, I changed my alarm code and wiped the panel clean of fingerprints.

It was nine o'clock by the time I felt too tired to do anything more. If someone could break through all of that, then I'd just have to accept being abducted. That thought didn't make it any easier. I was tired, but it felt like I'd guzzled down two espressos and still hadn't burned the caffeine off. All this security—they were measures I hadn't resorted to in a long time. I hadn't gone through that whole routine in years, but it came back to me quickly, as if I'd never stopped doing it. It's amazing, isn't it? The experiences that damage us leave such lasting impressions, and even when the danger fades, the lessons learned are never truly forgotten—even if we'd be better off if they were.

Kudo-kun couldn't keep his nose in his own business. He texted me once, and then again an hour later, and then every fifteen minutes after that, increasingly insistent on a response. I messaged him back just because I was afraid he'd call the police if I didn't, and of course, he was sour about it. If you don't understand why I didn't want to talk to Kudo-kun, know that the first thing he told me once we started talking was that Professor Noto still had connections to former members of the Kuonji clan, so an old Kuonji retainer might've been available and looking for work.

In hindsight, it all made sense. Professor Noto had managed to keep an unusual amount of control over her intellectual property. Connections with the Kuonji might've helped her make money off her discoveries, and even if she donated much of that to charity, there's no substitute for power and influence.

Since there was no way I'd be sleeping for a while, I decided to do something useful. Professor Noto liked to know a lot about her students. It seemed only fair to return the favor. I read about her exploits at science fairs and dug through records of the school newspaper she helped publish in high school. I wasn't looking in a specific place. I just thought that something would jump out at me in time—a reason Professor Noto might target Tsuruya-san and Amari-san. A twisted love of mysteries, perhaps? Was she challenging Kudo-kun to some perverse game?

I kept looking and looking, but I'm not a detective, and I never have been. The night wore on, and I slept a little—very little. That night, I remembered that merely being safe doesn't equate to feeling secure, and there were a great many things I couldn't do to feel secure without giving up a little safety. The answer to what Professor Noto was doing and why—I wouldn't find that just by poking around on the Internet.

* * *

So, the next morning, I made myself presentable, took the bar out from under my doorknob, and went out to find that answer. Kudo-kun drove me to a coffee shop near Tsuruya-san's home in Suzaka, and we met Tsuruya-san there for some additional questions. She'd been targeted for a reason, and Professor Noto had long taken an interest in her, hadn't she? The professor had invited her to volunteer at a nursing home for the mentally challenged. Why?

"I was looking for a change in my life," Tsuruya-san explained, but we didn't believe her. She wouldn't touch her coffee. She was alert and wary, hoping that we wouldn't follow up on her obvious attempt at evasion.

"Why?" Kudo-kun asked, but again, Tsuruya-san deflected, suggesting it was just middle-aged dissatisfaction with life. She was wasting our time trying to protect herself, so I told her what we believed, as much as I could without giving away anything too specific. The kidnapper had taken my friend and colleague, a student of Professor Noto's. That person, whoever they were, had an interest in the death of Amari-san's father, who had been stabbed and died before Amari-san's eyes. Amari-san's mother had long claimed it was self-defense, but we had reason to believe that wasn't true.

So I asked Tsuruya-san if she'd ever been through something like that, something that would make the kidnapper target her the way Amari-san had been—something where someone was hurt, or perhaps died, and she concealed the truth for her own sake or someone else's.

I expected that Tsuruya-san would say _no_ immediately and end our conversation, but even that woman, who knew no shame in her personal life, seemed a thousand times meeker in that moment. "There were three of us," she said after a long pause. "We were in a car going into the mountains to go skiing. We got caught in an avalanche. The car flipped over. My boyfriend hit his head. He was bleeding. We were buried under six meters of snow, and the woman who was sitting behind me got the idea to start digging her way out. It's a stupid idea, you know. You're supposed to stay put. People will find you eventually, and if they take a while, you have a lot better chances in a car with an air pocket than trying to dig your way out." Her voice had become a little hoarse. She took a sip of coffee, but it didn't help. "The police asked me what I told her when she got that idea. I told them what I just said—it was a bad idea—but that's not really what I said to her at the time. My arm was broken from the roll-over. She was the only one of us in good shape. Kotaro was getting sleepy, I thought for sure he had some kind of bleed in his brain. That woman offered to dig her way out, and maybe, just maybe, help would get to us faster. I told her there were risks. She had to be careful." Tsuruya-san looked to us, her eyes begging for sympathy. "What would you have done?"

Kudo-kun wrote down what Tsuruya-san said diligently, taking a long time after she'd finished speaking to complete his notes. He wasn't even looking at her when he said that he would have to tell the police about this, and he advised her to hire an attorney to protect her interests. Tsuruya-san didn't complain about that.

"Professor Noto knows?" he asked.

"I've never told anyone about what really happened in that car," she said. "Not before today. But when they found the body—I took it pretty hard. That's when Minori approached me. We hadn't been especially close before then, but she took an interest in me after that. I always felt like she knew, but she never said so. She said I could take all that bad energy, those terrible feelings, and not let them go to waste. She told me about the nursing home, and I thought sure, why not? I went there for two years, but I got a new gig and didn't have the time I used to. She'd seemed annoyed about that, and we stopped talking. I just felt like, it was good and all, but my heart wasn't really in it, and it didn't make up for what I'd done."

Sometimes there's no way to make up for what you've done; you just tell yourself you can so you can keep going.

"That's all it took to convince you to volunteer?" I asked.

Tsuruya-san looked aside as she thought back. "I was ready to tell her to fuck off, but Minori said she understood a little of what I was going through—really understood, not that fake empathy bullshit people try to bamboozle you with. She'd been in my shoes before, standing beside the river between life and death, watching as someone washes away. That's exactly how she put it, and at the time I didn't give it much thought, but it's a strange analogy, isn't it? It still sticks with me. The river between life and death…"


	13. The Tragedy in Chikuma

Twenty years before, Yamadera Ryo, a teacher at Ikeda High School in Chikuma, south of Nagano City, fell from the Route 403 bridge and drowned in the Chikuma River. He was fondly remembered by many in the community, including 17-year-old Noto Minori, then a second-year student at Ikeda.

That morning Kudo-kun and I read as much as we could about the death of Yamadera-sensei. Archived news reports identified Yamadera-sensei as a faculty member for five years at Ikeda, teaching literature and advising the journalism club. Yamadera-sensei had been seen almost the moment he fell from the Route 403 bridge, and some "unknown minor A" had reported the incident to emergency services, but whether person A had been a student at Ikeda, male or female, and so on—none of that was publicly known, and Inspector Yamato was reluctant to disclose that information. Kudo-kun had already helped a great deal, but he was still a private investigator, and access to records for a theoretically unrelated case would require more paperwork.

Kudo-kun came up with a clever solution: if the police couldn't tell us more information about the Yamadera case, we could get the information directly from people who had been involved. Around lunchtime, he and I headed south, to Chikuma.

I'd never stopped in Chikuma before, but I'd passed by many times on the train from Nagano to Tokyo and back. The mountains were steep there, so there wasn't much of a tourism industry. Instead, the town seemed to run right up to the mountain slope with development and old farms.

Yamadera-san business was, confusingly, called the _Hibiki Family Bakery_, after her maiden name, but it was definitely her shop. The bakery was mostly empty, save for a clerk at the register and Yamadera-san toiling away at some sandwich bread for the lunchtime rush.

I introduced myself as a student at Shinshu, and I told her some troubling things had happened to another student as well as a friend of the Professor Noto's, and we suspected it had something to do with her husband's death. I was hoping she could shed some light on the matter, and Yamadera-san was happy to oblige. She washed her hands, took off her hair net, and sat down with us, ordering pastries for the table. She wasn't much older than Professor Noto—maybe 45 or 50. I guessed that when her husband took up the job at Ikeda, she had to have been quite young.

Yamadera-san told us what the public news reports couldn't. Her husband had been the target of harassment for nearly a year by the time he died. There had been rumors about him taking a liking to young women. "They were absolutely untrue," Yamadera-san insisted, "but someone on the school board had it out for him, and some of the students and other teachers believed them."

Professor Noto had been one of the ones on Yamadera-sensei's side. She had been the president of the school journalism club, and he had been the club advisor. They'd had a close, but professional, relationship. Professor Noto herself had gone to the widow Yamadera and told her about that night: Professor Noto had run into Yamadera-sensei on the bridge and sensed he was troubled. They'd spoken for some time about matters that Yamadera-san wouldn't share—nothing that gave real insight into her husband's state of mind, though, which made it all the more confusing. Professor Noto, at the time, hadn't suspected that her teacher would commit suicide, but once they'd said their goodbyes, Professor Noto turned around. A car came to an abrupt stop on the middle of the bridge, and someone got out yelling about a man jumping over the side. Professor Noto never saw it, but she knew. Yamadera-sensei couldn't be seen anywhere else on the bridge.

Yamadera-san thought highly of Professor Noto. "I'm glad she grew up to be such a successful woman," said the baker. "She's always been very kind. I'd only just opened this bakery a few months before everything happened. Minori-chan helped me out part-time after that. It was a big help." Yamadera-san never thought there was anything more to it—to Professor Noto's reasons for looking after her. The police had investigated, of course. They hadn't found any evidence that Yamadera-sensei had improper relationships with his students, but just because there was no evidence didn't mean it didn't happen. I could imagine Kudo-kun's train of thought already: Amari-san and Tsuruya-san had been targeted not for something material they had but for their similarities with Professor Noto. To stand on the riverbank between life and death—the professor's analogy was almost true to life, and Amari-san and Tsuruya-san could stand with her.

When we were finished with Yamadera-san, Kudo-kun and I headed back to the train, going over the very same bridge that Yamadera-sensei had fallen from twenty years before. The circumstances were different—it had been night when he died—but we could still stand there and see a little of what he'd seen. There were some overgrown baseball fields on the west bank of the river, and as we crossed, I wondered if the old photos of the crime scene would show us that those fields had been in good condition back then, or if they'd even existed at all. In twenty years, a park could've sprung up and fallen into disrepair already.

* * *

Back at prefectural police headquarters, Kudo-kun shared what we'd learned with the inspector, and they began building a potential profile: the culprit was driven by some lingering guilt over an event in the past, and she'd used her knowledge of other people's tragedies to torment them for making the same mistakes. There likely had been some trigger that had started this spree of acting out. These ideas could help pressure Professor Noto into slipping up. They asked me if I remembered anything stressful that Professor Noto had gone through in the past few months. It took me a little time, but I remembered an incident from the previous semester, something that had cost the professor a lecture and forced a teaching assistant to come looking through our lab for her. I gave the two of them the details, and they seemed ready to run with it.

The inspector carried out the interrogation herself, aided by a subordinate to help her with the facts of the case. Kudo-kun and I were permitted to stay in an observation room to communicate with the inspector over an earpiece.

The professor was calm, acting like she thought we couldn't prove anything. She had a bored look on her face, as she often did whenever someone was wasting her time. The inspector didn't let her stay that way for long.

"What can you tell me about Yamadera Ryo?" asked the inspector.

The professor scoffed. "Someone's been busy," she said. She'd assumed Kudo-kun was responsible for digging up that part of her life, but at the inspector's prompting, she told her side of the story. Yamadera-sensei had been a victim of harassment at the school for some time. Some members of the school board thought he was tainted, and the faculty and students had doubts due to how he treated some delinquent students—kindly, and with compassion, instead of showing them firmness and demanding discipline. In her words, he was as pure as a newborn kitten and as gentle as one, too. His suicide was a tragedy. It changed the professor's life.

Kudo-kun shot me a look, and without even needing to hear from me, he asked the inspector to pass on a question: how did it change the professor's life? The professor was careful about her response, but after some consideration, she said that she thought a lot about how much she remembered about that day—about being on the bridge, and that made her interested in the mechanism behind memory. It was, without a doubt, a turning point in her life.

"Aren't we all shaped that way?" the professor remarked. "Isn't it natural, then, that I'd look for other people like that? When I was in university, I thought it was frustrating. No one else seemed to care about what they were doing the way I thought they should. That's why I try to foster an environment of like-minded people. Don't you think that's worthwhile?"

Professor Noto found it offensive that we were questioning her. Maybe she thought that made me ungrateful. Well, I'd never asked to be put in that environment. I'd never hoped to be surrounded by people like me. I'd performed many experiments with the professor. Not once had I thought I'd actually been a subject in an experiment she was running. She'd used Amari-san and me. She'd used our grief and guilt. She'd used that nagging twinge inside me that had cried out, _you can't just sit here and live a normal life_, and the worst part about it was that I felt she understood me. That was what had made her so dangerous. Perhaps the devil's words are so seductive only because she knows what it means to be seduced.

But try as we might, we couldn't pin anything on her. She was smug and confident; she must've been. Why else would she tell us so much so freely? She had solid alibis. She could name a dozen people who had once worked for the Kuonji, but most of them were good, law-abiding citizens now, and the few who weren't had been jailed. Time and again, Professor Noto dismissed the mere insinuation that she'd done anything wrong. It wasn't just something to deny. It was absurd to her.

The inspector asked the professor about her pattern of involving people like Amari-san and Tsuruya-san in her life. She insisted that she'd never sought out Amari-san or Tsuruya-san in an untoward fashion. That was her story, anyway. Amari-san was already working in neuroscience when Professor Noto heard of her. Tsuruya-san had already been part of the professor's hiking group when the avalanche hit, but the professor had made a point of taking Amari-san aside at a conference. After the avalanche, knowing what Tsuruya-san had been through, she'd recommended volunteering at the nursing home, so Tsuruya-san could do work through her guilt.

"Did you do that with any of your other students?" asked the inspector.

The professor seemed annoyed at the insinuation, and she glanced past the inspector, at the mirror. "I don't know if someone wants me to answer that."

The inspector insisted she answer the question anyway, so the professor sighed in exasperation and proceeded to explain. Amari-san was not the first. She was only the professor's most recent protégé, and yes, I was among them. She resented the idea she'd been singled out in this investigation for, in her words, "totally circumstantial evidence". She'd had a dozen students since establishing her lab in Nagano City. Only some of them had, in her words, "special potential".

Back and forth they went. The professor had a tendency to derail the conversation, but the inspector, to her credit, was well-prepared and never engaged the professor on these tangents. They talked for over an hour about the professor's past students, a call to the police from a neighbor a few months ago, and more, but more often than not, the professor looked past the inspector with an uncanny knack for finding me behind the mirror despite not being able to see me. When it was all said and done, the basic facts remained: the professor knew each victim, she had the connections to abduct them, and she had self-admitted reasons for being interested in them.

And in me.

It was as we were drawing close to dinnertime that the inspector asked her most devastating question.

"Professor, what can you tell me about the disturbance officers responded to at your home last October?"

The professor was careful in her response. She'd had an argument with a friend of hers. It became heated. The issue had long been forgiven, and she didn't expect it would be a problem again.

"Yamadera-sensei died on October 19th," noted the inspector. "The officers responded to your residence on the anniversary of his death, October 19th. Are you telling me that's a coincidence?"

"It is."

"It was a small argument, you say, but you didn't report for your lecture the next day. It had that much of an effect on you?"

Professor Noto stiffened, and she looked past the inspector, glaring at the mirror. Even as the inspector continued to ask for an answer, she was bristling. No, the professor insisted, it hadn't had that much of an effect on her, but she had cut herself and realized she needed to get that seen to properly in the morning, and she noted that she'd never missed a lecture on the anniversary of Yamadera-sensei's death before. With that, she refused to answer any more questions, asking instead of she was being formally detained. The inspector said she wasn't, so Professor Noto got up, eyes locked on the mirror, and jerked her head to the side.

I went to follow her. Kudo-kun tried to stop me. "Don't do something rash." As if he could say that to me. I'd do something rash if I wanted to.

I met Professor Noto in the hallway as the inspector and her men were escorting the professor out. Professor Noto didn't wait to let me have the first word.

"What is this really about?" she demanded. "Did I do something to you?"

It wasn't what she'd done to me that was the problem. It was what she might do to me, but the professor didn't understand that. She kept badgering me for answers. How could I think she was responsible for this? She'd called Kudo-kun herself, but that was exactly the sort of thing that was strange about her! Why did she have contact with him? Why would she think to call him as soon as I told her Amari-san might've gone missing? That wasn't normal! To any outside observer, her interest in Amari-san, Tsuruya-san, and me was nothing short of perverse.

Professor Noto seemed annoyed that I thought so. "I was trying to look after you. When you came to me, you were lost. You didn't know what you should do. I got inside your head, and I helped you find a way out. I have only tried to help you, and Kagura-kun, and Aki. If this opportunity isn't something you actually want, if you decide you want out, I won't stop you, but don't forget that I was there for you when nobody would touch you, when everyone thought you were just another of those bird-brained maniacs! And I won't forget about this farce."

With that, she left, police flanking her on each side. We hadn't proven much about the professor. Kudo-kun tried to tell me it was just a matter of time either way, but I worried that whatever happened, the damage had already been done. Either the professor was guilty, and I'd thrown away five years of my life on false hope, or she was innocent, and I'd doubted her for nothing.

* * *

Though Professor Noto had left, the investigation continued. Every aspect of Professor Noto's life would be turned upside-down until we had an answer, one way or another.

At dinnertime, Amari-san stopped by police headquarters to give us more information in light of what Professor Noto had told us. She brought sandwiches from Johnny Christo's, which Kudo-kun and I enjoyed. She was in a better mood all around, basking in the presence of her idol, but that glow didn't last long. Once we started asking her questions about her relationship with Professor Noto, reality set in, and the bright and friendly Amari-san gave way to the cool and deliberate woman instead. The idea that our advisor had conspired against her was shocking, but after thinking back, Amari-san dismissed the idea. "I don't see _why_," she argued. "The professor's taken care of us. She visited me in the hospital."

That could've been an act of a psychopath, but Amari-san still disagreed. There were too many examples in our past. Far from intimidated, she thought Professor Noto's recruitment of her to be compassionate and understanding. The professor knew what Amari-san had been through (or at least the part that Amari-san had allowed others to know), and she'd never outed Amari-san to the rest of the group. She'd insisted that Amari-san take days off for her appointments if needed (and not just the most recent one). The professor often meddled in our lives like that. I remembered one time she'd invited herself to my apartment for dinner, not unlike how Kudo-kun had, and she'd taken the opportunity to criticize my sense of design and style. In her opinion, my apartment hadn't been inviting enough, and people who came to visit would feel as though I was watching their every movement until they left. "You're going to want friends coming over to feel at ease," she'd said. If I decorated my apartment only with my enemies in mind, I would never be happy.

Though Amari-san was concerned about the connections between herself, Tsuruya-san, and the professor, she still preferred to believe that the professor was innocent. It could've been someone trying to get back at her. It could've been an old friend or associate with a grudge. I told her I didn't think an old friend with a grudge would've known about Amari-san's past. She conceded the point, but even so, she didn't feel anxious about the matter.

"Even if Professor Noto brought me here for bad reasons, I knew what I wanted to study," Amari-san told me. "I knew what kind of research I wanted to get into. I've already made contacts with colleagues around the country and around the world. Even if Professor Noto goes to jail and I have to finish my degree somewhere else, I think I'll be able to do that."

I envied Amari-san for her confidence in the future. It wasn't something I shared. I'd published some papers, yes, but Professor Noto had pulled strings to get me into the program at Shinshu. After I'd spoken to her, I knew in my heart no one else would offer me such an opportunity. I'd waited a while to try see if I would feel differently, but in truth, I was already going down that path. Haibara Ai was a myth and a memory, and the life she'd lived was over.

Amari-san asked me to go with her for the evening, but I was too preoccupied with the case to consider the idea. At the same time, I felt useless helping with the investigation: after reading through pages and pages of prior police reports, I began to wonder if there were such a thing as adult-onset dyslexia, and every new thing I learned about Professor Noto added to the pit in my stomach.

Kudo-kun tried to cheer me up, saying that when this was all over I could go on a real vacation. Maybe I would take Amari-san with me. He had been planning on taking a sabbatical from detective work to travel the world, meet forensics experts, and share some wisdom with ambitious students and local police. He'd already received some offers to give guest lectures at prestigious universities. If Amari-san and I happened to run into him at one of those, it might not be so bad—not for him, anyway. Of course he would enjoy an opportunity for fans to drool over him. Really, the whole idea was far-fetched—to think he would step away from detective work for even a week! He could do much better if he meant to lift my spirits.

"Who's trying to do anything like that?" he complained. "I was just saying I'd be going on a trip sometime, and if you coincidentally went to the same place on holiday, it might end up being fun."

How strange it was for such a brilliant detective to be so clumsy dealing with people. Maybe it was the price of such insight: being accustomed to deceit and subterfuge, he may have found it hard to navigate relationships without those experiences poisoning him. It was nice—what he was trying to say. He may have been occasionally insensitive and petty, but he could also be quite kind. It was a big deal for him to say that he was thinking about going on a trip. Perhaps he was even seriously considering it, but Kudo-kun had been obsessed with mysteries since childhood. He wouldn't be able to stand a long vacation. We both knew that. If he thought otherwise, even for a moment, he was only fooling himself.

In the end, I took more comfort knowing that Kudo-kun was capable of such folly than from his strange offer. It's human nature to be foolish, but each human being is foolish in different ways. Remembering that made me feel a better about this situation: about having come to Nagano, about being deceived, whether by Professor Noto or my own twisted mind.

It may have been because I was feeling better that I was careless that night. In the morning, I'd been so deliberate—setting my alarm with a new code, for instance. I'd also used an old trick that my handlers had taught me. When leaving, place a small, heavy object near the door and fasten a ribbon to it; I used a twenty-centimeter statue of a mermaid for this. Slide the ribbon underneath the door, making sure it's visible outside. Then, as you leave, pull on the ribbon so that the statue sits flush against the door. Cover the ribbon up with an exterior doormat. If all other security measures fail, you'll know if someone went through that door while you were gone. The statue would have been pushed aside, and the ribbon's length would be shorter.

I'm not sure if I checked the ribbon when I came home, and because of that, I assume I didn't, but I'll never be sure. I went inside, and I found that the alarm couldn't be reset: the phone line was down. The lights were out and wouldn't turn on. I tried going for my phone, but a shadow moved against the faint glow of the streetlamp outside. The shadow thrust at me, and a spark lit up the room. My muscles tensed up like a whole-body cramp, and I collapsed. My attacker straddled me, put tape over my mouth, and tied a chloroform-soaked rag over my nose.

"Relax, Sherry," she said. "Don't struggle. This won't hurt."


	14. Chained

There's a sense of disorientation and uneasiness when you wake up in a cage. You don't know what you can do in your surroundings. You don't know how far you can push their limits. Every action requires care and promotes anxiety. The best thing to do—the first thing you should do—is study the environment and analyze it for weaknesses.

I woke up with a cable tie around my right wrist, binding me to a rusty pipe. The pipe ran vertically, so I could stand and slide the cable tie along the pipe's length, but that was all I could do. The floor was cement-like, and I first thought I had to be in a warehouse or other industrial type of building. There was a void where shelves might've rubbed away some of the dark red paint from the floor. If those shelves had still been there, I would've been able to touch them. There were more shelves on the other side of the room, well out of reach.

A single incandescent bulb lit the room, with a pull cord dangling from the ceiling. If it swung far enough, I might've been able to put a fingertip on it, but it was about half a meter too far away while stationary. Not counting the pole, the only object within my reach was a blue, plastic bucket. It was new—probably because the kidnapper had left their previous bucket at the stables. I would've been caught dead before peeing into a bucket, so I did something useful with it instead: I threw it at the dangling cord, and the bucket made a satisfying _clunk_ when it skipped off the floor. The cord bounced against the shade and floated sideways, still beyond my grasp.

The sound must've drawn someone's attention. The door to the storeroom opened, and a woman walked in. She had short hair tied tucked underneath a baseball cap, and she wore a respiratory mask. She looked at me, then looked around to see what the noise was. When she found the bucket lying on its side, she snatched it up and sat it down straight—and out of my reach.

"Don't break my lightbulb," she said. "They're not cheap. If you need to go, ask for the bucket."

"What's this about?" I demanded.

"I'm setting you free, Sherry."

She left again, and as far as I could tell, my wrist was still tied to that pole. _Freedom_ must not have meant what it used to.

My captor was a strange woman. After a time, she came back with set of microwaved gyoza on a paper plate. Only paper was soft enough that I wouldn't be left with a dangerous object. She brought out a short stool and watched while I stared at the plate, and when I wouldn't eat, she took one of the gyoza—I insisted on a particular one, just to be sure they weren't drugged—and ate it clumsily, trying to obscure her face while eating since she couldn't continue to wear her mask. "Eat," she insisted. "You need your strength."

She was interested in my well-being—as interested as she could be while holding me against my will. She was willing to hear questions, but she absolutely wouldn't give helpful answers. I asked if she was working with Professor Noto, but she wouldn't give a straight answer. "There are only two people here: you and me." I asked if she was the same person who'd taken Amari-san or Tsuruya-san, but she gave the same answer. "Nothing else matters except what's going on in this room."

My captor wouldn't say what she wanted from me. In the meantime, she set some ground rules—which, of course, were not up for negotiation. I would sit there and not attempt to escape. No hunger strikes or anything of the sort would be tolerated. She would ask me questions, and she expected my truthful and unguarded cooperation. If I met all those conditions, she would release me unharmed. The process should take no more than a day-and-a-half, and after that, she would never see me again.

"I keep my promises," she stated. "I've left no one with permanent harm. You know that."

"Are you referring to something outside of this room?" I asked. "Because _inside this room_ I don't know that."

"Don't be stubborn," she said. "Think of this room as your temple, a place to wash off all the crud that's built up on your soul. If you have an open mind about that, this won't take long."

Temples are generally considered places of spiritual healing, and I had a feeling that my captor needed a great deal of healing, but however mad she was, she was also meticulous: when I finished eating, she took the paper plate away, not even allowing me a flimsy tool, and she wheeled in a rectangular cork board full of documents and photos. It was my life in fragments, with snapshots of me at all ages, and even with a few spare photos of my friends back home, the Detective Boys.

"You've been through a lot," she began, and she plucked one of the photos off the cork board—a photo of me with my friends back in Tokyo. "You didn't have many friends before them, did you? Did their company help you deal with being on the run?"

Of all the questions she could ask—about criminal conspiracies and drugs that shouldn't exist—that's what she was asking?

I mean, yes, they did help, but not a day went by without me worrying that my former colleagues would find me and everyone I'd come to know. It'd been selfish that I let them befriend me, but I'd needed them. I couldn't have endured those times without them. Growing up, I'd never known that kind of camaraderie. In the schools I'd attended in America, I hadn't fit in. I was too bright for my classmates, and my mixed blood hadn't helped. Being in hiding, I had to try to fit in enough to pass as ordinary, and it put me in a position to have the social life I'd never had before. If I could've gone to university with all of them as Haibara Ai, with them never knowing what I'd been through and that I was so different from them, I just might have done it, but even Yoshida-san, who wasn't naturally suspicious, had figured out I wasn't who I said I was. It was pointless to think of it as a missed opportunity when, in fact, it was never an opportunity at all.

"Maybe," I concluded.

My captor didn't think that was an informative answer. There had to be more to my feelings, but I didn't see the value in cooperating. Why did she want to know?

"I said this place is a temple," she began. "That means you should be willing to look inside yourself and reflect."

"Mirrors are for reflecting, and probes are for looking inside yourself," I pointed out. "I don't see any of those here."

Losing her patience, my captor rose, and she turned the cork board over with a steady, deliberate motion. On that side were details of a man's death. He'd been an Englishman, in his late 30s, dead by electrocution.

"Okay, Sherry," said my kidnapper. "What can you tell me about this man who died four years ago?"

* * *

Four years before, after I'd accepted Professor Noto's offer and joined her group in Nagano, she took me to my first conference. Juggling research and coursework hadn't been easy—it'd been some time since I'd had to study for difficult classes—but after some acclimation, I'd managed to make a small contribution to the group's work. I hadn't been the lead researcher on that effort, but the professor believed a conference would be good opportunity to make connections and talk with other researchers about the field, and it would help me decide on my own project.

I brought a poster presenting our work on how a newly-discovered compound affected learning rates of rats, and for a few hours each day, I stood by my poster, talking with passers-by—all scientists or students in their own right—about my work and others', about interesting talks we'd attended, and whatever else came up. These conversations were productive and useful, but they were also few and far between. As one of my colleagues told me, all the new and exciting work was in machine learning. The habits of animals and how that informed human cognition wasn't getting a lot of attention. That was just how it was.

That's why, when a man in a gray suit came up to my poster and started asking about my work, I did my best to cultivate interest. I gave him the same spiel that I'd given most of the other passers-by, and he nodded along, not saying much. When I was finished, he didn't have any questions, which I thought was strange. Almost everyone thinks it's polite to ask at least one question, but he didn't. I asked him who he was, and he said we had a mutual friend. At the time, I assumed he meant Professor Noto, but the man handed me a business card and went on his way. The card's front side was blank. The back had only a handwritten message: "17:30, UK Okonomiyaki. Come alone. -PS: Call Agasa."

My adoptive father, Professor Agasa, inconveniently had a meeting with a client for the first two days of the conference, which meant that, though I was in Tokyo, I couldn't see him until later. This strange message made me think his client's sudden interest might have been more than just a fit of curiosity. I called the Professor, and he seemed to be enjoying himself. His client had taken him on an indulgent tour of a nearby resort. The Professor was confident that he was on the verge of a huge sale, and all he had to do was close the deal. He'd have to do that in the morning, though, since he and his client had gone for drinks, and he knew better than to negotiate that way. I asked him what he was drinking, and the Professor laughed.

"Eguchi-san recommended the house mead. It's really something! I'll have to buy some when I get back home. It's made with honey; did you know that?"

I did know that, and I warned him not to drink too much. Just because it was sweet and made of honey didn't mean it was any less intoxicating. Beyond that, I told the professor I would get back to the conference, and that I hoped to see him when he was done with his negotiations. By that point, it was already 16:45, so I started looking for how to get to this okonomiyaki restaurant. I made a point to be early. Always be early to a meet. It deprives your counterparts of the ability to set up surveillance and control points of entry without you noticing.

My contact followed the same rules. I'd made a point to be early, but he was already waiting for me outside the restaurant, which hadn't even opened yet. "Hello, Sherry," he said, grinning and greeting me in his native Yorkshire tongue. "You've been doing well, I see."

So was he, considering he was supposed to be dead. In hindsight, I wasn't too surprised to see him alive. Mead had always prided himself on getting out of seemingly impossible situations. This feat had been no different. Once the owner opened the restaurant for the evening, Mead insisted I join him inside, and he explained how he'd managed to cheat death. Mead had been on his way up in our outfit, having set his sights on joining the boss's inner circle, but one of his operations had gone awry—through no fault of his own, he insisted—and when he found out that Gin himself had been assigned to take him out, Mead had taken matters into his own hands, faking his death by making it look like he'd fallen into a vat of molten steel. "It was really a rotting pig carcass!" he confessed, laughing uproariously about the whole thing. "I couldn't believe those idiots never smelled it!"

Because he'd fallen out of the boss's good graces, Mead had never held much of a grudge against me for working with the police. If anything, I'd done him a favor—there were fewer people looking to kill him—but his new life was getting more difficult by the day, which was why he wanted my help. Mead was after a stash that Vodka had kept in Gin's apartment. It was a safe hidden beneath the floorboards. Mead had been close enough to Gin to know that the cache was there, and knowing Vodka, there had to be more than just money and weapons inside. Vodka had been meticulous about holding on to information, in part because Gin was more of a blunt instrument with a short memory. Vodka's cache could prove useful for building new connections and staying afloat in the criminal underworld—or so Mead believed. What Mead needed from me was a fingerprint. Vodka had had the foresight to install a biometric lock on the cache, and since Gin and Vodka were unavailable to supply their fingerprints, Mead needed an alternate source.

"You still have it, don't you?" he asked. "The locket."

Gin's locket—a token of twisted affection the likes of which only he would ever offer. Most people put cute photos or maybe strands of hair in a locket. Gin went a step further: he made a fingerprint in his own blood and expected I would return the gesture.

I did still have the locket, and since Mead was asking me to find it, I knew he couldn't find it without me.

"Guilty as charged!" he said. "You was always a clever one, Sherry. So, enjoy your pancake, and take us to the good professor's place and find us that locket. I think you know what happens if you argue with my terms, don't you?"

I'd argue with him as much as I liked if it meant less chance of the cops getting wise to his plan. If he'd already searched the Professor's home and hadn't found it, then he'd probably attracted the attention of the Professor's nosy neighbor. The two of us going back to the scene together would guarantee more unwanted attention.

Mead didn't like the idea, but even he wasn't reckless enough to argue. "Where is it?"

"It's in Tokyo," I assured him. "Give me until morning. Don't follow me."

We had a deal, and since I hadn't touched my okonomiyaki yet, Mead left me to hide away until we could make contact again. Mead had been one of the more jovial operatives, but that didn't make him any less disturbing. He could shoot a child between the eyes and shrug it off without a second thought. "We're all pieces of meat in the end. Nowt that happens to us or what we do makes a lick of difference." Being around most former members makes my skin crawl, but with Mead, it was something worse: it was like looking at a corpse that had been strung up by some demonic puppeteer. He was all dead inside, but I still had to watch him smile and laugh.

From the restaurant, I headed to the Professor's place. Mead and his people had done a real number on it. While they'd had the good sense not to mess things up too much on the outside, my old bedroom and the Professor's had been upended. I didn't bother trying to put things back together. That would have to wait until later. Still, it was pretty shocking to see the mattresses and futons thrown about and cut open. Mead had been indiscriminate—a sign of true ignorance and stupidity. Who would hide a locket in a mattress and expect to find it again?

It was in what used to be my private laboratory that I found the worst of the scene, with my old desktop computer's parts strewn about the room and not even the keyboard left intact. I could give Mead a tiny bit of credit for disassembling all the electronics instead of carelessly smashing them to see what was inside, but that was as far as I was inclined to start liking the man.

What Mead had failed to appreciate was that I'd expected Gin's fingerprint would be useful to me, if only to help identify him for his crimes. While I'd had no attachment to the locket once he'd killed my sister and turned on me, I'd made sure to keep that photograph, hoping it would be instrumental to his end. I'd hidden the photo and the fingerprint in another locket, one that the Professor had given me for my nineteenth birthday, with the Professor's picture in front of it. That locket must've been found because the jewelry box was open and lying on the floor, yet the locket itself was missing.

"Looking for something?" said a voice. A man came out of the hallway—where had he been hiding?—and from his hand dangled the gold chain and locket with the Professor's face revealed. That man looked at me, and seeing my reaction, he grinned smugly, knowing he was 100% right.

It was the kind of certainty that only Kudo Shinichi could muster.


	15. The Mark

My captor asked a lot of questions about Kudo-kun that night. She knew of his exploits, but she'd never met him in person. What kind of man was he? Not at all like his public persona—I could say that much with certainty. It's true he had a flair for the dramatic. Who else would've deliberately hid himself while I had been searching through the remnants of my room, only to come out with the locket I'd been looking for dangling from his closed fist? What a strange and complacent human being.

On that, my captor agreed with me—Kudo-kun was quite full of himself—and as she studied her cork board, looking over some photos and papers regarding Kudo-kun, she took the conversation in an unexpected direction. "He's become a celebrity since he took your people down."

That was true. By that point, he'd been gallivanting all around Japan, taking up cases left and right. Somehow he managed it while going to university and juggling an intense relationship with his longtime girlfriend. He seemed totally at home with the situation life had put him in, positioned to work noteworthy cases and to be with the love of his life.

"You pay attention to him," said my captor.

I thought about answering, but I decided against it. She wouldn't have understood. That man, for all his brilliance, had failed to help my sister when she needed him, and he got on with his life just fine in spite of it. I've never forgotten that, but my kidnapper wouldn't have believed that story even if I'd told it to her, and I didn't want her knowing anything more about me than she'd already learned, so I kept my mouth shut, letting my grimace speak for me.

"Say something," she said sternly.

What should I say? What did any of this matter? Why was I strung up to that pole with a cable tie so tight around my forearm it was digging into my skin? Who cared about Kudo-kun being dramatic? Who cared about Mead getting what he deserved? Who cared about me missing an hour of my conference? What did any of it matter?

My captor stared at me for some time behind her breathing mask, and after some thought, she sat down on her short stool and dragged it close to me, bringing her eye level closer to mine. Her gaze was steady, and with her so much closer, I could see some strands of hair behind her ears and underneath her baseball cap.

"I know you killed that man," she said, "and I know that that moment changed you." She pointed to one corner of the cork board. Two of my papers were on there—one from before the conference, one after. I'd switched from animal learning to brain cancer research in that time—my own project, my way, with my background informing it, instead of doing only what was needed for the lab. Professor Noto had supported me, pleased that I was taking command of my career.

Before that point, my captor believed, I'd been going through the motions of being a normal student, but I was far from normal. I'd seen too much, suffered too much, and no amount of pretending could change that. My kidnapper had been looking for people like that. She was in a unique position to relate. She rolled up her sleeve, showing me the length of a long, jagged scar. "I got that when I was 12," she said. Some rivals of her father's family had decided to take out some competitive rage on her. Her father's associates had made sure the perpetrators were dealt with, but it was just one incident of many. She grew up with violence and ostracism. She knew well what it meant to try to pass as normal, to try to lead an ordinary life, only to find that it was boring, purposeless, and unsatisfying.

"People died trying to give me an opportunity to live," she said.

So she decided to take me captive—for what purpose? To give me a lecture? To position herself as the one and only person who could ever understand me? I didn't need a friend like that. If anything, she'd shown me that Amari-san could understand me just fine.

"So it was worth it?" asked the kidnapper. "Everything you've done just to keep on living—it was worth it?"

I didn't have an answer for her. It was a meaningless question. Those were things that I couldn't take back.

Despite my silence, my kidnapper seemed pleased, and she left me alone for the night to think on what we'd talked about, not that I even knew where to begin. The whole ordeal didn't make sense. To suffer without being victim of someone's malice is often how the world works, but that doesn't make it any easier to bear. To offer someone freedom from a cage one built was nonsense. My only conclusion was that nothing that woman had done made sense—except perhaps within her own head.

The interrogation was over for the evening, and my captor left me to rest, however much I could with my arm bound to that pole with the cable tie. She left the cork board with me, and I stared back at it as I drifted off to sleep, trying to piece together what she thought about Mead's death and why it was worth kidnapping me.

* * *

Four years before, Kudo-kun had stood in my old makeshift laboratory and dangled a locket from his closed fist. He held it up and asked if I'd been looking for it, which I thought strange. Why would he think I was looking for that locket when half my belongings were still scattered on the floor? He claimed he found the locket with its face open, which told him that someone had looked at it and decided it wasn't what they were looking for. If I had some idea what the burglar had wanted, then I would've been looking for that locket, too. Was I looking for that locket, and if so, why did I think someone would be looking for it?

I turned those questions around. What was he doing hiding in the Professor's house? He tried to play it off like he was coming back from the grocery store and happened to notice that something was amiss, but I wasn't falling for that. He was working a case. "How long have you known about Mead?" I asked.

Kudo-kun narrowed his eyes. "Not that long," he insisted. "Just a couple months."

A couple months! And no one had thought to tell two likely victims that they were in danger! Never forget that detectives love uncovering secrets but hate giving them out. All for the sake of a case, the Professor had been lured into an assassin's crosshairs.

Kudo-kun told me to relax. Mead's man with the Professor was actually a deputy investigator under Furuya Rei, and Kudo-kun assured me that my conversation with Mead had been overseen by no less than two NPA officers at all times. Even the kitchen staff at that okonomiyaki restaurant had NPA officers undercover. We still had to maintain a low profile; Kudo-kun absolutely couldn't be seen with me, hence his hiding in the first place, but I was to carry out the meet and give Mead the fingerprint. Then, hopefully Mead wouldn't bother me again, and Kudo-kun and Furuya-san would go on their way.

That they wanted this whole thing to play out was strange to me. The simplest thing would've been to arrest Mead. It wasn't like he hadn't committed crimes before. Waiting for him to commit another wouldn't do them any good unless they'd benefit from his next crime somehow.

"You need Mead to open the cache," I realized. "You want him to open it!"

"Keep your voice down," he told me with a sigh, but yes, that was correct. Vodka's cache had a biometric reader and a keypad lock, and Furuya-san's investigators hadn't managed to discover the code. "You don't know what it is, do you?"

I knew Vodka had set it, and though Gin had thought enough of me to give me his fingerprint in blood, he'd threatened to cut me into little pieces if I ever so much as looked at them while they were opening the cache. What I did say was that Gin had insisted on failsafes to ensure that no one could use his fingerprint or code without tripping a trap. He liked that image. He liked most gruesome ones.

Despite that risk, Kudo-kun was willing to see the plan through. They wanted Mead to open the cache, and then they would arrest Mead and take the cache for themselves, tracking down all the contacts Vodka had amassed as Gin's minder, as well as any evidence of foreign accounts and money that would've been at their disposal. Though Mead had been on Kudo-kun's radar for only the last two months, Kudo-kun had been working the case for over a year—ever since we'd come out of hiding. He'd taken a small break to reestablish himself in his old life, but after that, he'd known there was more work to do. I thought that was quite sad. He had a wonderful girlfriend whom he should've spent more time with instead of wasting his life tracking down every loose end. I never chose to be involved with that life. Kudo-kun was willingly staying immersed in it, unconcerned with his own safety or well-being.

That stood in contrast to his opinion of me. To him, I should've been keeping a lower profile. It was bad enough that I'd decided to go into science. Going into a field so close to what I'd done before, and under my own name? He didn't like that.

"You of all people should know not to take giving up your own name lightly," I told him.

"I'm not telling you to do anything different," he said crossly. "I'm just saying it's dangerous. You couldn't have gone to Europe or somewhere else for a few years, until the heat died down."

"Should I be worried about that?" I asked. "Are there others looking for me?"

He claimed not to know about any other specific threat. He was just thinking out loud about contingency plans. There were good investigators and police officers out there, and if some of them had to keep an eye on me for my safety, then I was a distraction. Well, I hadn't gone to his doorstep begging for help, and like I said, he of all people should've recognized what more drastic steps would mean. I would've had to cut ties with Professor Noto. I would've had to pick out a new name and find someone else to work with. I might not have been able to see Professor Agasa, or even speak to him, for some time. If things were dire I'd do all of those, of course—whatever it took to protect him—but I'd spent more than enough time looking over my shoulder for ghosts, and Kudo-kun was no different from me. If he were really so concerned about safety, he shouldn't have gone back to his old life as a detective. He'd put a target on his own back, and on the backs of people he cared about. Disgruntled former agents surely wanted him to suffer for what he'd done—at least as much, if not more, than what they'd do to me.

Kudo-kun dismissed out of hand the idea of going back into hiding, which told me all I needed to know about how serious he was, and he changed the subject back to Mead. The meet would be monitored, and they'd equip me with a wire to make sure everything went smoothly and that I was in no danger. All I had to do was play the role I was given. Beyond that, there was nothing else to do but wait for morning. When he was finished briefing me on what would happen at the meet, Kudo-kun hesitated uneasily. "Is there anything else you want me to do?" he asked, gesturing at the room. "I'd offer you a place to stay the night, but Mead might get wind of it. I'm gonna have a hard enough time sneaking out without him noticing."

No, there was no way to pull that off. I'd make do, but I told him I would expect him and his associates to clean up the mess Mead had made in the Professor's home, once they were through. Kudo-kun looked cross at that, but he wouldn't argue.

* * *

The meeting that morning took place at a coffee shop a block away from Gin's old apartment. This time, I got there earlier than Mead, and I chose a table near the door, with good visibility on the other exit, just in case. It wasn't like Mead to show up later than someone else, but when he arrived, the reason was apparent: he'd stolen a utility worker uniform.

"Good morning, Sherry," he said, gently taking the seat across from me. "Have you got what I want?"

I showed him the locket, and he immediately grimaced on realizing that the locket had been at the house the whole time, but I kept it out of reach. Part of the script was to make sure we didn't give it up too easily. I asked for an assurance that the Professor and I wouldn't be harmed ("Only if we get the cache," he said) and that I would never see him and the likes of him again.

"So eager to be rid of us?" he said, laughing to himself. "I'll have you know I have it on good authority that cache is a life-changer. What are you doing right now—wasting your life in academia for a few measly quid? I know some people you could work with. Good money, good life, no regrets. You're a clever one. You could help us out."

"Am I supposed to seriously consider that?" I said.

He grinned. "Clever and stubborn," he remarked. My refusal hadn't bothered him; in fact, he'd expected it, but he thought my choice fascinating nonetheless. In his mind, what I was doing was grunt work, and while some people had to do that to make a name for themselves—himself included—he thought I was wasting my time trying to break into legitimate society. That's how he saw it. Of course, he was trying to play me. To someone like him, I was valuable only because I'd been considered pliable enough to work on rotten things and too lacking in self-sufficiency to go out on my own. Those people had practically raised me, after all. By saying I had no prospects in the real world, he was really trying to tell me I had no one else to turn to.

But I was no longer a frightened little girl. I was not about to go back to that world to be used. The only other thing I wanted from Mead before I never saw him again was an assurance that however he found me, he wouldn't go blabbing about it to other people and making more of our old friends come looking my way. I made that demand, but Mead laughed at me. For one, he wasn't the sharing type, and he thought I was more useful alive than given off to our mutual friends who probably wanted me dead. Aside from that, he hadn't done very much to find me. He'd almost forgotten about my existence, let alone that I would have something of Gin's, until a contact of his in pharmaceuticals told him he'd run across my name in the leadup to the conference.

"You think it's bad you've got my attention now?" he remarked. "What are you going to do when you're a professor? So you see, Sherry, we don't have to tell anybody about your new career. They're going to find out one way or another, and when that happens, you might run to Bourbon or that baby-faced detective brat. Maybe they'll help you now and then, but they're not prepared to clean up a problem when it becomes a mess. Then maybe you'll wish you had a friend named _Mead_, hm?"

He laughed in that obnoxious way when comedians who are painfully unfunny try to get a reaction out of people by laughing at their own joke. It wasn't helping anything, but he did let down his guard for a moment—he tugged at his sleeves, which were obviously too long and had been rolled up. The shirt didn't fit, and there was a dark spot on the collar. I couldn't tell what it was because it was dark on gray. It could've been oil or blood.

Part of what made Mead so dangerous was that he would pretend to be a friend right up until he stabbed you in the back, and then he would do it with a smile on his face, like he'd just stepped on your toe. _Oh, so sorry you have to die today. These things happen._ That was his approach to life, and just because he'd made it sound like there were no hard feelings about me turning him down didn't mean it was reality. I expected that, once he'd gotten the cache and was out of town, he wouldn't forget this, and if we ever crossed paths again, he'd wring from me what he thought he was due.

So I gave him the locket he'd been so keen on, and once he reminded me that if the cache didn't open he'd have the Professor killed, he went on his way to claim his prize. At the time, I couldn't have been happier never to see him again, and I didn't. I only found out later that Mead had triggered Vodka's failsafe. He'd been electrocuted, ending up as a paralyzed husk. I felt sorry for him—not that he died but that he failed to make a fresh start for himself. A chance to build a new life doesn't come often. For a fleeting moment, awesome power coursed through his veins, but in the end, it was wasted on him.


	16. Asclepion

Kudo-kun and the police had been disappointed to learn that Mead had died. Aside from the tragedy of the loss of a life, they'd been looking forward to interrogating him about my former colleagues and any remaining contacts he might've had. The cache was safe and sound, and it would take only a few days for the police lab to realize that Mead had failed to enter the code or apply the fingerprint properly, tripping the booby trap.

There hadn't been much I could do to help the investigators at the time. I'd seen Gin and Vodka use the safe only a handful of times, but the investigators were reluctant to let me go free, just in case they'd missed something. During that morning, I watched them plot their next moves: who would they investigate next, who else would know what Mead had been up to, and all that. While I had been trying to put my future on the right track, Kudo-kun and Furuya-san had been looking ever deeper into the past. Their backward gazes distracted them from the present; when Kudo-kun's then-girlfriend came by with lunches, he had to put the lunchbox aside, as he was in the middle of a conference call. At the time, I only thought he regretted having to be a little rude to her, but I later realized it was more than that: all his efforts to pursue Mead had been, at least in part, to ensure the he and his girlfriend could have a future. Mead's death had delayed future a little longer. Whether it had pushed it back a few days or a few years no one could say.

* * *

My kidnapper asked me, "If you understood you were setting Kudo and the police back so far, why did you kill Mead?"

I did not kill Mead. Mead killed himself with his poor attention to detail. He should've been more careful. He should've known that Gin would insist on some gruesome booby trap because that was Gin's personality, and Vodka never would've gone against Gin's wishes. It was a tiresome question, only slightly less tiresome than having my arm hang from that pipe while the cable tie was putting pressure on an artery. My hand was tingling. My back ached, and my captor still pretended that it wasn't a punishment. I liked Gin's ways better. At least he was up-front about inflicting suffering. He was stubborn, yes, but it was a stubbornness you could admire.

My captor's stubbornness was foolish. She insisted I had killed Mead, but all her evidence was circumstantial. Exhibit A: after the incident with Mead, my career took a different path. Instead of working exclusively on others' projects, I started my own research on new methods to attack cancer behind the blood-brain barrier. Instead of only presenting a poster in an obscure part of a conference, I'd given two 12-minute talks presenting my research, and a colleague of mine had been invited for a 30-minute session with my name prominently featured. I'd published three papers and was working on a fourth. In my kidnapper's point of view, I'd come out of the shadows. Surely, she felt, my experience with Mead had influenced that.

I conceded that there was some truth to that. Mead had found me by chance, and with few former members of our outfit still at large, I'd seen no point in hiding. The rest of that change in career path was not a change at all but a natural evolution of a student's responsibilities. I'd always needed to select my own thesis topic.

Exhibit B: I had many reasons to want Mead dead. Once Mead had left the coffee shop, I'd asked Kudo-kun if he knew how Mead had obtained the utility worker uniform. It did not seem generic to me; rather, I thought Mead had stolen it. My captor believed I felt more strongly about it—that I must've thought Mead had killed a man and taken the uniform by force.

That was a cute theory, but it didn't prove anything. So what if I thought Mead had killed someone? I'd always known he was capable of that. He liked to talk about his exploits openly.

My captor knew these two pieces of evidence were circumstantial. They were suggestive of motives, but they didn't offer any explanation of how I could've killed him when everyone agreed Mead had been electrocuted trying to open the safe. Did she think the fingerprint was faulty? Or perhaps Gin had deliberately given me a bad print, knowing I might try to use it against him? No, my kidnapper's case hinged upon a statement from Kudo-kun himself.

Exhibit C: Through some methods, my captor had gotten a hold of Furuya-san's report on the investigation into Mead and Mead's death. The report contained a passage contributed by Kudo-kun, who described the moments after the investigative team learned about that Mead may have tripped the booby trap. Kudo-kun recounted how they'd asked me about potential traps—I'd known it might be trapped, but I'd had no idea what the trap was—and how it might've been triggered. Again, I had no knowledge of what would trigger the trap. I'd assumed that it wasn't just an invalid code or fingerprint but a specific code or fingerprint that could've been given deliberately to stymie an attempted interrogation. As far as I knew, it was as simple as entering the code and putting one's finger on the reader. I'd never asked how Mead turned the bloody fingerprint into something the reader would detect.

Kudo-kun had recounted all those statements in painstaking detail, including my gestures and body language while I'd explained the safe's mechanism of operation. "Miyano punched a code into the air with her index finger. Then, she closed her fist and held it sideways, sticking her thumb out as if to place on a fingerprint reader. Her thumb was held horizontally." Mead, on the other hand, had placed his replica thumbprint on the reader vertically.

"'Miyano Shiho may have known that Mead would trigger the booby trap, even with Gin's fingerprint, if Mead placed it on the reader vertically. We asked her if she knew whether the fingerprint reader was meant to be used horizontally, and she claimed not to know. She did not mention it either way to Mead during the morning meeting.'" My captor unpinned a page from the cork board and held it up for me to see. "Kudo thinks you killed Mead," said my captor. "Why should I doubt him?"

Given that, I'm not sure anyone would disagree. That Kudo-kun and Furuya-san had wondered if I'd killed Mead shouldn't have been a surprise, but they'd never breathed a word of it to me. Aside from that one question about the operation of the safe, nothing ever came of their inquiries. I hadn't been arrested, let alone tried, for Mead's death. According to the rest of the report (how did she get her hands on it?), they felt there wasn't enough evidence for an arrest, and there never would be unless they could prove I'd seen Gin or Vodka open the safe that way. Any witnesses would be unreliable, likely motivated to see me incarcerated or unwilling to work with the police no matter the incentive.

Still, to think that Kudo-kun's suspicions were on paper for the police to see in black and white—that was just like him, wasn't it? Someone who thinks he can see through people has no reason to actually trust them. He never had reason to believe I'd changed. Perhaps he, and Furuya-san, and Jodie-sensei, and everyone else in law enforcement always believed that I was just one step away from showing my true colors. All along, I'd deceived myself with a comfortable lie, thinking that I could move forward, that I could make my name clean again if I acted the right way and spent enough time on it. I thought there was something painfully ironic about the whole thing, though. In the end, it didn't matter if I'd actually killed Mead or not. He deserved his death. There was no question of that, but regardless of whether I'd helped him along, there were people who believed I had, and nothing I could say or do would change their minds. The memory of who I'd worked with and what I'd done was as tight a binding as the cable tie around my wrist.

My captor flipped the cork board over, her prosecution finished. "I actually don't care if you killed Mead."

I laughed. "Then why? Why all this?" I pulled against the cable tie, and it scratched my skin. "Do you go dredging through people's pasts just for fun?"

Not just for fun, she insisted. She dredged through my past because it affected me in the present. "How much have you been hiding from Kudo Shinichi since then?" she remarked. "What about your other friends and family? The past is an anchor, and you've been dragging it around behind you. How long do you think you can keep going before you run out of steam?"

"As long as I choose to," I said.

"What if you didn't have to?" My captor took a pill bottle out of her pocket. It was clear, and inside were four large pills. "This is Leze. It's a PTSD drug. It helps block the memory of something painful." She placed the bottle in front of me, just inside my reach. "Take the pills and put Sherry away. Cut her loose with that anchor. Throw away the burdens of the past and all the guilt for the things you've done. Make yourself into the Miyano Shiho you should've been, that you wanted to be, and forget."

Forget.

At first I thought the idea was absurd. It couldn't be possible, but my captor wasn't laughing, and if this were a test, she wasn't giving away any signs of manipulating me.

If I could've forgotten, I wouldn't have stopped with just Mead. He had been only the latest in a long line of regrets. My parents died in service of those criminals. I could forget that terrible night when I learned they'd died. My sister was murdered trying to buy my freedom. I could wipe away the sight of her photo in the newspaper that told me she was gone. It occurred to me that I could go further: I could wash off all those times of uncertainty from when my time running from my former colleagues came to an end. I could go back to being Haibara Ai if I wanted to. Or would I have to go further? Erase my time in hiding and meet my old friends anew—fresh-faced, idealistic, and pure?

The scary thing about her proposal was that I'd thought exactly that way for a while. I'd thought there was no future for Miyano Shiho, that I could start over with a new life, that I had the friends and support to do so. It was appealing to me. It was intoxicating to me. And maybe, if I'd known about Leze back then, I would've erased my horrible past.

If you think that sounds perverse, you're right. Even if I could erase all the unpleasant memories from my mind, my friends from that time would still know that I'd suffered, and even if they wouldn't, if anything I'd gone through still affected me, despite my best efforts to erase it from my mind, then there would be no point. _Truth obscured is still the truth._ Kudo-kun would've said something like that. And no amount of erasure would change that I'd given up the idea of being Haibara Ai a long time before. I was dissatisfied with being her. That peaceful, idyllic dream was nothing more than a saccharine fantasy to me—the life equivalent of an endless supply of cotton candy. It had been a nice treat, but it wasn't something I could handle day after day.

So I took that bottle of pills, and I rolled it back to my kidnapper. She stopped it with her foot, and she stared at me. "You think you're so special? You think sucking it up makes you strong? You've been lucky. You haven't had all of that come crashing down on you. Do you think it won't happen?"

"Tell me about it," I said.

My captor narrowed her eyes, and she picked up the pill bottle. We were finished. She'd hold to her promise: I'd be freed in short order. She wheeled out the cork board and took the small stool with her. She tossed the bucket back to me, hoping I would use it instead of wetting myself, but I placed it upside-down next to me. I'd hold it if I wanted to, and she couldn't make me do otherwise. She didn't laugh or try to convince me to do otherwise. She just called into the other room for someone to get me some food before I was put back where I belonged.

It should've been a relief, but the ordeal wasn't over yet. That woman and her co-conspirators were going to get away. How many more people would she abduct and subject to this madness before she was satisfied? And what if someone took her up on her offer, willingly carving out their terrible memories in some misguided ritual of purification?

Sitting there tied to a pole, I didn't know what I could do to alert the police. My handbag was on a shelf near the far side of the room, but I couldn't have reached it unless I'd been made of rubber, and I was starving. My captor's companion, a man, came in with another plate of gyoza, which weren't nearly enough to sate my hunger. The man left right away to answer a call from the woman, who wanted him to "prepare the van". They left me with the gyoza—four perfectly wrapped pan-fried vegetable dumplings. They smelled strongly of garlic, so much so that the aroma drowned everything else out.

* * *

I can't tell you for sure what happened next, but in talking with the investigators, here's what I think happened.

My captors found me hanging limp from the cable tie, just as they expected. The gyoza had been spiked with Leze and sedatives, which would render anyone unable to resist while being wrapped up in a tarp and loaded into the back of a van, and their memories of this ordeal would be washed away. The man took the van while the woman stayed behind to clean up the site and remove all traces of my captivity.

The man drove me in the tarp some ways. The van was loud, with an inefficient engine. The noise was so great that no one could've heard me in the back even if I'd banged on the walls and shouted.

That was fortunate because, what my captors didn't know was that I'd hidden the gyoza underneath the overturned bucket.

When I thought it was safe, I climbed out of the tarp and found my handbag and other belongings in a corner of the van's storage area. My phone had been turned off—probably to keep the police from searching for my position—but I powered it up, and luckily, I still had some battery left. Though the van was noisy, I didn't dare make a call, just on the off chance that something might be heard. I send a text message to Kudo-kun: I was all right, but I was still in custody of the kidnappers, and they needed to hurry. If the woman looked under that bucket, she would find the gyoza, call her man, and he'd know that the jig was up.

So I waited. I waited not knowing whether each stop was the last. Would the man break open the van doors and hold me at gunpoint for knowing what they wouldn't allow Tsuruya-san and Amari-san to know? All I had was my handbag as a weapon. I crept toward the doors, hoping I would be close enough to strike without arousing suspicion.

At one stop, I heard sirens. Kudo-kun messaged me back saying they'd identified the van. The man driving didn't try to lose them in a chase. He pulled over and cooperated. He gave himself up.

The police opened the back doors of the van with two men pointing guns, just in case there was a surprise they didn't know about, but I had my hands up and open, and they helped me down. A few car lengths away, Inspector Yamato and Kudo-kun were watching, and the officers escorted me to them.

"Are all right?" asked Kudo-kun.

I hadn't slept much, and I desperately needed a bathroom, but all in all, it went better than the last time I'd been cuffed to a pole. I was alive, my mind was intact, and though I had mixed feelings seeing Kudo-kun, knowing that he'd once quickly concluded I could've killed someone, I saw no reservations in his eyes that day. He held on to my hand and gently ushered me to the paramedics, who were ready with IV fluids and a gurney. My captor wouldn't have believed it possible, but sometimes, the past stays in the past. Our relationships change, and we make new futures with each other.

That was one thing I'd been looking forward to, something that I could never erase.


	17. Reflections

When something goes wrong with the human body, I'm reminded just how similar we are to our animal cousins. Poke us, and we bleed. Beat us, and we bruise. Our bodies fail, one way or another. When you're a patient, you're beholden to the whims of doctors and nurses. You're little different from a dog or cat at the vet. At the start, your doctor might ask you questions, but after a while, they cease to see you as an equal. They subject you to drugs and examinations. They ask for understanding and consent, but they don't listen any more than a computerized system would. Your existence as a thinking being is an afterthought. I don't think that's a moral failing of doctors. It's a natural pattern. It's inevitable. After a while, all hunks of flesh and blood seem identical. I could say the same for my rats in the lab. The bracelet the hospital staff gave me, that they tied around my wrist, was no different from the numbered tags I'd applied to my rats. How is a passing nurse supposed to know who Miyano Shiho is? He looks at a nametag and a chart, and he should hope that everything is in order, just like an undergrad checking on an experiment.

The doctors tried to get me to sleep. They gave me drugs to help me relax, but there are some things no human being can purge from her mind. I didn't like hospitals very much. There's a sense of being trapped. If you wander off on your own, an army of nurses will try to put you back in your place or shower you in paperwork to make sure you understand they're not responsible for you once you're gone. It was a more comfortable prison than the last few I'd been stuck in, but my previous jailers had more pretenses of sincerity. Gin never hid how much he wanted me to suffer. My kidnapper, too, had been up-front about her delusions. I couldn't say the same about the hospital staff, who smiled in my presence while thinking about how long their shifts were and how much they could stand before going home. I would've liked to go home, too, and be seen as a human again.

A long time ago, I realized that everyone who visits a patient in the hospital must want something. I'm not being cynical when I say that. People can want things that are mostly benevolent and altruistic. To want to see a loved one well again—there's nothing wrong with that, but it can have a selfish aspect, too. That idea was on my mind when the nurse told me I had visitors. I knew the police would want something from me. What I didn't expect was that someone else had come first: Professor Agasa.

Kudo-kun had called the Professor once I'd been reported missing, and the Professor had rushed up to Nagano at the first opportunity. He'd clearly been stressed out about it—there was a cookie crumb in his moustache, and I reminded him that he should stay away from vending machines. He apologized, hoping I would understand, given the circumstances, and I let it go. Worrying over my safety had been far worse for his health than a bag of cookies, after all.

The Professor dragged a chair to my bedside, and he rested his cane on bed's metal railing. "How are you, Ai-kun?" he said warmly, not minding my remark about the cookies one bit. It's not in the Professor's nature to hold grudges or become angry. Even when most people might've been upset, the Professor was steady. Kudo-kun was on the case. Good detectives were on the case. They would surely find the culprit, and when they did, everyone would be safer for it. Justice would be done, or so he hoped. He thought it better not to dwell on such unpleasant things, and while he promised not to pry, if I wanted to talk about what happened, he would listen. Either way, he'd stay awhile. "We can go around town for the day," he said, "and I'll take you to dinner."

The Professor didn't have the money to take me to dinner. He'd been nursing an injury for most of the past year. I couldn't accept that. It was enough that he'd come, and he could stay. My apartment was probably a crime scene still, but after a few days, he could stay at my place, and I could show him some of the sights. We'd done a few tours of Nagano before, but I was sure I could think of something else to visit.

The Professor thought that was a fine idea, but he wasn't sure he would stay in Nagano. He needed to go back soon to prepare for a convention. "Actually, there's a very sharp young man I'd like you to meet," he told me—someone working on a reactionless drive.

I said _no_, I would pass on that. The Professor's eye for men—men who could be potential boyfriends of mine—had put me through two awful dates already. It was bizarre. He'd helped develop a matchmaking app (giving up the rights for pennies on the dollar due to other underperforming investments), but he was a terrible judge of compatibility in person.

"At least take a day or two to visit," he argued. Professor Noto surely wouldn't mind—if she were still a free woman, anyway—but my answer wasn't changing. I'd been trapped in a room for a day and a half. I had a lot of work to do, and the police would want to hear from me while they continued the investigation.

The Professor sighed. He knew all about how I'd been running around with Kudo-kun to investigate the Amari-san's disappearance. He wasn't about to object to me playing detective, but he felt I should keep some distance. It was personal, after all. "Sometimes," he concluded, "it's best to leave these things to other people."

I didn't see it that way. This was a direct threat to me and to people I cared about. I'd relied on other people for protection and comfort before. Most of them were dead. No one can be more responsible for your own wellbeing than yourself. That's how it has to be. If the Professor didn't think I could take care of myself, he didn't know me very well.

Of course, the Professor wouldn't admit to that. He was confident I'd survive, one way or another, but if that woman eluded capture for a day, a week, a month, or a year—would I give up? Or would I keep going after her? At some point, finding the culprit would make me only marginally safer. At some point, I'd have to let it go.

He might've been right, but sometimes it's not enough just to be safe. You have to feel safe, too. That woman—she took something from me. Every person is entitled to some privacy, to the security of knowing that there are some things they won't be judged for. She tried to pull me apart like a shucker would, looking for a pearl of commonality between us. She peered inside my shell, and while she didn't find that pearl, she must've seen all the ripe flesh there. I'm not a soft woman, but everyone has a piece of them that's vulnerable. The only people who don't are psychopaths and monsters. I'm no monster.

The Professor stared out the window for a time. "Maybe I'll stay for a few days after all," he decided. I thought that was a good idea; it's terrible to travel back and forth in a hurry, and I started planning a weekend visit to Zenkou Temple—we'd run into a murder on our way there the last time, which derailed our plans. The Professor seemed interested, but once we sorted out some of the logistics, the room grew quiet again, and he asked, after allowing the silence to sink in, if I were ready to see the police. I looked at my own faint reflection in a darkened monitor. Anyone in a hospital bed appears frail, and as such a faint reflection, you can't help but think you're less a human being than a ghost. It was as if the police were coming to commune with my spirit.

I told him I was, and he stepped out to notify the nurse, who went to the waiting room to fetch the visitors: Inspector Yamato, one of her detectives, and Kudo-kun. The inspector was polite, asking how I felt and if I were truly ready to tell the story. Her detective sat in a corner, studiously taking down every word that was said. Kudo-kun had a notepad out, too, but he watched with intense eyes. Kudo-kun isn't an unfeeling detective who prizes puzzles and mysteries over all else. He has an intense sense of righteousness to him, and he despises senselessness and cruelty. When a crime crosses that threshold into pure evil, his sarcastic know-it-all personality melts away. He becomes determined and dangerous, and no one with wickedness in their heart can stand in his way then. It's both amazing to behold and also a bit sad. When the stakes are lower, his curiosity is childlike, and there's a certain charm to it. The determined Kudo-kun has no such charm to him. You feel he'll make you safe, or he'll give his dying breath trying. There's no charm in that. It's noble, but it's also sad.

The inspector led the questioning, and we began with my last memory of being free—coming home to my apartment to be ambushed. I learned from the police that someone had cut the landline connection to the entire building, effectively disabling my alarm system without using my code. The police hadn't yet located the warehouse in which I'd been held, but they deduced it could be anywhere northeast of my apartment, since the van had been traveling in the opposite direction, and Amari-san had been dumped near her place. The investigators were interested in the kidnapper's evidence board and her motives for taking me, which brought me to the kidnapper's questions about Mead. While I went over that case for the inspector and her associate, Kudo-kun chimed in from time to time, clarifying his role in that affair and giving them a wider background about the Organization and me.

"Did the kidnapper believe you killed Mead?" asked the inspector.

With Kudo-kun's eyes firmly on me, I told the inspector that _yes_, the kidnapper did believe that. She felt that through my inaction, I had withheld vital information about the safe. Mead could've avoided tripping the booby trap. That was the kidnapper's conclusion—that I'd known the fingerprint should've been entered sideways, but in my opinion, all her evidence was circumstantial or speculative. No one could've known, no matter how strongly they believed it, whether I'd killed that man.

The inspector asked Kudo-kun if he had anything to add about that. He said he didn't, "for now," but he could get in touch with Furuya-san and forward some copies of the case materials if needed.

After that, we talked about the kidnapper's attempt to drug me with Leze. I didn't think that was a coincidence: it was the drug Professor Noto helped develop. Even though she wasn't the one who held me—I was confident of that—she had a role in this somehow, and the woman with the scar on her arm had targeted Amari-san, Tsuruya-san, and me for a reason. The inspector agreed it was worth looking into, and I got the impression that we'd be talking with Professor Noto again soon.

When the police were finished with me, they offered to send the nurse back in to check that I was ready to leave, but Kudo-kun asked for a moment alone. The inspector's subordinate began to protest, but the inspector allowed it, so long as I agreed, and I did. As the others left, Kudo-kun took the Professor's chair at my bedside. His eyes narrowed, and he said, "You shouldn't have gone home, and you definitely shouldn't have gone home alone, you idiot."

It wasn't the first mistake I'd made in my life, it wouldn't be the last, and he was in no position to lecture me. How many times had he done something impulsive while in hiding, making contact with his girlfriend for no reason other than his feelings getting the better of him? For such a brilliant detective, his decision-making could be terrible, and if he was so sure I shouldn't have been alone, he should've worked harder to make me stay at the Metropolitan or somewhere else.

"Like I could've convinced you to stay with me," he said.

He could've. If, instead of calling me an idiot and hard-headed, he'd said that he just couldn't stand the thought of me being hurt, that all he wanted was to lock me up in his hotel room to protect me, then I might've considered it. If he'd whispered it in my ear breathlessly, then maybe.

"Why on earth would I act like that?" he cried, unwilling to even look at me. Kudo-kun has no sense of humor except what he intends to be funny.

He changed the subject, asking about the kidnapper. I was sure the kidnapper had no concrete basis to believe I'd killed Mead? No piece of evidence, no documentation, no report? It was absurd. To think he could dance around the question, as if to deny that I knew, and that he knew that I knew, and so on—just silly. I didn't want to play that game with him. Yes, she had his report somehow. I'd seen a copy in front of me. It's not like I'd been sure, at the time, that it was genuine, but I figured she had no reason to lie about it, and his question just confirmed it was real. He really did think I killed Mead, didn't he?

"I did," he admitted, looking me squarely in the eye. "And I still do. Are you upset about that?"

No, I always thought he saw me that way. I was no saint and no angel. It was only natural he would harbor that sort of suspicion about me. Tigers don't change their stripes, after all.

Kudo-kun disagreed, saying that even convicted killers can be rehabilitated, but that was beside the point. Once again, he said, I had been careful with my words. "You're not upset that I believed you killed Mead, so what are you upset about?"

He was so certain. He was always so certain about things. He was so certain about some things that he didn't even bother asking a real question. He had the audacity to tell Furuya-san, in an official report, that I could've killed Mead with silence. Did he ever do me the courtesy of asking if I'd done it?

Kudo-kun folded his arms, and he invited me to tell him my side of the story. Did I kill Mead or not?

The answer to that was complicated. There were times I would think back to when I'd seen Gin and Vodka use that safe, and I'd wonder if I'd really seen Gin put his thumb on the sensor sideways or not. Later, I came to believe that I must've seen it that way but just didn't realize it consciously, and maybe, while talking to Mead, I didn't want to think about it. I didn't like him. I would've killed him myself if I'd had the chance. Kudo-kun and Furuya-san were letting him run loose in the hopes of getting more information from him, but he was too dangerous for that. He'd stolen a utility worker's uniform. What would've happened if that utility worker had come across Mead in the act? Did Kudo-kun really think they had the resources to stop Mead in a situation like that?

Kudo-kun thought that was awfully convenient—that even I didn't know for sure if I'd withheld the information from Mead intentionally—but he wasn't interested in talking about Mead any longer. They'd investigated the matter. They'd dug up everything they could. They couldn't prove I killed him, so I was a free woman, and Kudo-kun's judgment of me wasn't affected in any way. He already knew I was capable of it. He pointed a finger gun at me. "You're the type of person who protects those she holds dear ferociously," he said.

"Stop that," I said. "You look like an idiot. At least bring a toy so you don't look stupid."

He scoffed, putting that stupid finger gun away, and he went on, saying that I might have it in me to kill, but he knew I wouldn't do it lightly, even if he would disagree with my reasons. He would never agree with people who kill for revenge or amusement, but he could faintly understand why someone might kill to protect herself or others. He would never forget the Mead case, of course—and if ever the proof came to him that I'd killed Mead, he would be duty-bound to forward it to the authorities—but he'd stopped looking for that a long time ago. "Today," he said, "I'm here to find the person who took you and Amari-san, and I won't let that woman find you again."

"Even when your client is a criminal, you're so dedicated to your work," I said.

"You're one to talk. Did I hear something about you wanting to go back to the lab?"

I had a job to do, too. I was thwarting killers of a different sort—microscopic ones, that is—and turning my past into something positive.

"Always trying to move forward, aren't you?" he said, shaking his head. "Don't be so hard on yourself."

How easy it was for him to say. To Kudo Shinichi, some worries could be cast aside at will. It must've been so convenient for him. If I had just a fraction of that ability, I wouldn't have had a care in the world. No wonder people found him magnetic. Hanging around him could make you feel that justice could actually be served, that past sins could be forgiven, and that all was right with the world.

With the Mead matter put to rest, we talked about my abduction. Kudo-kun and the inspector had already identified the accomplice, Nishina Daisuke, a former detective with the Nagano Police. His most recent post was in the organized crime division, and he would've had the connections to get Furuya-san's report on the Mead case, but thus far, Detective Nishina wasn't talking, whether out of loyalty to the kidnapper or a sense of self-preservation. Though they'd begun tracking down Nishina's known associates, talking to all of them would take time. Silence and obstruction—none of it was surprising, but to think that the kidnapper would insist on such secrecy for the sake of offering me forgetfulness? Neither of us could make sense of it. There had to be more.

Kudo-kun cautioned me that sometimes there _isn't_ more, sometimes there are no answers left to be found. Sometimes madness can be traced to a defect in the brain, but the rest of the time, it's the product of a lifetime of bad experiences priming the pathways of learning to give bad results. I wasn't satisfied with that argument, and to his credit, Kudo-kun didn't like it, either, even though he'd put it forward. There might be a time to give up searching for more answers, but that time hadn't come yet.

* * *

Having a little medical knowledge can be helpful, especially when you want to fool doctors. I had no desire to stay in that hospital one minute longer, and thankfully, the doctor on duty was eager for me to leave. I told him I felt fine and wasn't tired. He subjected me to a brief workup, and I lied in all the right places. Doctors and nurses sometimes don't treat patients like human beings, but unlike lab rats, people can speak. A person saying they feel fine is hard evidence to override, even with lackluster vitals, and especially with a hospital full of other patients who actually complain. The doctors let me go, and I took some aspirin to help with the pain in my arm. I would be fine, eventually.

While the police were tracking down more of Detective Nishina's contacts, the three of us—Kudo-kun, the Professor, and I—visited with Amari-san. We hoped Amari-san would remember something about her abduction once she heard a few of the details from me. If she did, she might come up with some piece of information that I hadn't noticed, and we'd be one step closer to identifying the kidnapper. At least, that was Kudo-kun's argument. He gave me the choice to see her myself or to head back to police headquarters while he and some detectives questioned her again. I wasn't about to allow strange detectives to bombard Amari-san with that story. She deserved to hear about it from a familiar face.

Amari-san was more than happy to see Kudo-kun again, and she was delighted to meet the Professor, too. She knew of his inventions and his recent turn at app development, and I sensed they would have a lot to talk about if they spent more time together, but we had other reasons for coming. Amari-san understood that. She made us tea and then sat down, steeling herself. She must've imagined the worst in the days since her attack, almost a full week since she'd disappeared at her father's gravestone. Maybe it's making light of what happened, but I didn't think what I'd endured was so bad. I'd suffered worse at the hands of crueler people. Amari-san had been through a tragedy once, but there's a difference between impulsive rage and cold malice. When someone wishes you great harm, their bad intentions are like a porcupine's quills. They stick in you, they're painful to remove, and the wounds linger, even after they heal.

Amari-san could take heart: she'd been targeted by a maniac, a madwoman with something to prove. She'd been singled out not by our advisor—at least, not as far as I could tell—but by some crazy person who wanted to offer her the chance to forget. The kidnapper had collected documents and photos concerning the death of Amari-san's father. That woman may have even suspected that the story of how Amari-san's mother killed her husband wasn't true. In any event, the kidnapper must've offered Amari-san the same choice I'd refused: to take a handful of pills and forget.

I told Amari-san about being chained up, about the gyoza and the bucket, and about everything else I could think of, every specific detail, that might jog her memory, but nothing came back to her. She marveled at the absurdity of the kidnapper's offer. "I wouldn't be here if not for that," Amari-san told us. "I wouldn't be in this school. I wouldn't be in this degree program. I don't know if I even cared about the anatomy of the brain before my father died."

If you could erase a memory as easily as pressing _delete_ on a keyboard and removing a file, that would be one thing, but the brain is so much more complex than a computer, and computers have no sense of self or identity. Amari-san's sense of identity disturbed me. She was, on one level, the affectionate and cute young woman I'd known for two years. She fawned over Kudo-kun, getting flustered when he complimented her tea, but as she tried to process my story, there was a sense of discontinuity in her personality. Her captivity had affected her. She wasn't sleeping well. She laughed it off, saying she'd have one more thing to add to her therapy sessions, and though she said it with a smile, I didn't think it was much of a joke. I felt a sense of longing from her—longing for that empty space in her mind. It's hard for people to deal with the reality of existence—to understand that, while we can look around a room and see the stains in the carpet or the seams and layers in a coat of paint, most of those details fade from our memories with time. Can you remember what you were doing exactly 24 hours ago? How about exactly 24 days ago? 24 months? 24 years? It all washes away eventually, and we're left to realize that the people we are now can only put together in bits and pieces how we got here. For Amari-san, that realization was more stark than it usually is. She forgot something she should've remembered. It was sudden and unexpected, to lose one's memory of a recent event so completely, but in every other respect, it was typical.

If Amari-san felt that her sense of reality was wavering, the details of my abduction didn't help her find her grip. Kudo-kun unhelpfully thought to clarify portions of the story about Mead. As far as I was concerned, it was a simple story of a woman's former associate coming back to extract cooperation from her. All the stuff about a nosy detective rummaging around her house was irrelevant, but I couldn't get Kudo-kun to shut up about it. He was so eager to add little details that he could only know first-hand, not caring that every story and piece of information has a proper time and place. We were there to talk about what happened to Amari-san and me, not to talk about him. I shot him a look, hoping to make clear that I would not have my story told through someone else's lips. He backed off, but he made his position clear, saying it was tiresome to talk around the details for no reason. He could be so obnoxious sometimes, but he was right about one thing—it was tiresome. It's hard to live up to a fiction. You have to live it, breath it, and believe in it. You have to come just short of convincing yourself that fiction is reality, and over time, that dissonance wears you down.

So, in deference to Kudo-kun, I told Amari-san more—about how some goody-two-shoes detective came searching through my home with the Professor and had the gall to investigate a former associate of mine, who had targeted the Professor and me, without so much as a courtesy call. Amari-san caught on that this was a secret adventure of his that had never become public, and while she wanted to hear more, there was an unspoken question hanging in the air, one that she wouldn't ask while Kudo-kun and the Professor were still in the room. When we were finished going over the kidnapper's interest in Mead, Amari-san showed the men to her closet, where she had her shrine to all things Kudo Shinichi, and she told them to take their time looking around. She moved their teacups and sat beside me.

"I guess it's better that I'm just a fan of detectives," she said. "Obviously I could never be one myself."

It wasn't her fault for not catching on sooner. Discretion had protected me for a long time, and while I'd found her fascination with Kudo-kun strange at first, I'd never thought of her as a fool. I sensed early on that the idea of Kudo Shinichi filled a hole in her life. He gave her a sense of direction; he was someone she could admire harmlessly. For most people that might seem unhealthy, but for someone who was already unhealthy, it was better than having nothing at all, and as role models go, you could do much worse.

I told Amari-san I was sorry, but she refused the apology, saying instead that we were even. Over the past few days, she'd wondered if she'd ever allowed me to get to know her properly. She'd thought my remark at her doorstep before had been kind but exaggerated. After hearing the story of my adventure with Mead, she understood that wasn't the case, but she was still puzzled about how we should be from now on. "How can I go up to you at the lab and say, 'Shiho-chan! Did you hear about this amazing thing?' It just seems pointless now."

But it wasn't. Were all those times she'd shown me a new discovery in an article or an exploit of some famous detective just for show? No. She liked those things. That much about her was real. Just because there was more to her than that didn't frighten me. I hoped to get to know more of that other side of her in time, and I hoped she would get to know the other side of me in time, too—if she wanted to.

She put her hand out and pouted. "You're being sour again. You're being sour, aren't you? No arguing."

I put a fifty-yen coin in her hand, and she fetched a jar from her purse to stuff it into. The jar was quite full of coins, enough for her to buy a nice treat. As she put the jar away, she looked back at me, waiting for my response.

"No more sour Shiho-chan for the rest of the day, I promise," I said, bowing my head.

I think that was the first time all week that I'd seen Amari-san truly happy.

* * *

It was a relief to come clean to Amari-san, but there was still one more person to confront: Professor Noto.

Once I'd gone missing, the police had taken Professor Noto into custody. The situation was too suspicious to ignore, and though she wasn't the woman who'd kidnapped me, they were convinced she had something to do with it. Throughout my disappearance, she hadn't cracked. I hoped to change that. I asked the inspector if I could speak with the professor, and she allowed it, but only with me sitting behind glass and with an officer controlling the microphone, so that no sensitive information would be revealed. I was fine with that. Kudo-kun sat beside me. Amari-san came, too, seated behind me and to the side. We were all looking back at Professor Noto. There would be nowhere she could hide from us.

When the police turned down the lights in the interrogation room, the professor's reflect faded, and she saw into the room with Kudo-kun, Amari-san, and me. "Shiho-kun—you're all right?"

I'd never been better, no thanks to her, and unlike the Amari-san and Tsuruya-san, I remembered. She'd set us all up to be taken, hadn't she? The professor denied it, but I knew better. How could that woman have known about all three of us? How could she have asked us to think on our past sins and traumas and forget using the professor's own drug?

The professor asked how the kidnapper used Leze. The police didn't want me to explain too much, but I said what I could. The whole kidnapping was meant to make me vulnerable to her offer. She interrogated me about potentially killing someone. She tried to build a rapport, showing me the long scar on her arm. She tried to make me feel that I would always be doubted and questioned, whether by Kudo-kun or someone else. It was all an effort to manipulate me into taking the professor's drug, and if I'd been less secure about my life, I might've taken her up on her offer. That was what the kidnapper wanted—to transform me.

"You wanted to transform me, too, didn't you?" I asked Professor Noto. "That was your plan all along."

She didn't look back at me. "Tell me about the scar," she said.

The police officer on the microphone flipped a switch, and the mic went dead. Kudo-kun conferred with the inspector. They thought there was no harm in telling the professor; they still had plenty of time before a court would order her release. They allowed me to answer.

"It was on her right forearm," I began.

"A long, straight scar, with a jagged bend near the inside of the elbow," she said, demonstrating on her own arm.

"Professor?" I asked.

The professor stared past us for a time—long enough that I had to say her name to get her attention—and in those ten or fifteen seconds, all her defiance and cool certainty ebbed away. In all the time I'd worked with her, I'd never known Professor Noto to be squeamish. She'd held up cadaverous heads in jars and used them to frighten unsuspecting undergrads, but as she sat at the interrogation table, it was like watching her as she witnessed something gross—like a bloody delivery or an operation on a live brain.

"There was a girl I knew," the professor said at last, shakily, and she had to take a sip of water before continuing. "She always wore a sleeve over her right elbow, even in the summertime. I asked her once if she had an arm problem, and she said no. I promised I wouldn't tell anyone if she showed me, so she rolled up her sleeve, and I still remember the look on her face—how she was looking away, and how she asked if there was anything _else_ I wanted to see."

"Who is she, Professor?"

The professor's gaze came back to us, but her voice was halting. "Her name," she said, "is Ishikawa Suo."


	18. The Lawyer Ishikawa

The young Noto Minori, editor-in-chief and president of the Ikeda High School Journalism Club, was in her second year of high school when she met Ishikawa Suo. Ishikawa-san, who was one year behind Professor Noto, had a tall and athletic build. If she'd been better liked, she could've been recruited for wrestling, boxing, basketball, or volleyball, but Ishikawa-san was a loner, and most other students stayed away from her. It was on the advice of a teacher that Professor Noto reached out to Ishikawa-san, inviting her to join the school newspaper. At the time, Ishikawa-san seemed annoyed with the idea, but the teacher convinced her to try it.

Professor Noto learned later on that the Ishikawa family had connections to the Kuonji clan, an independent yakuza group that operated in Nagano City and the surrounding areas. Back then, the Kuonji had become unpopular with the locals due to a conflict with the better-established Yamaguchi family. The war had been especially bad in Chikuma, with a handful of innocent civilians killed during a botched hit. The blame fell upon the Kuonji, who faced increased pressure from the police and the Yamaguchi for their brazen tactics. The Kuonji clan eventually collapsed, leaving their former retainers and footsoldiers vulnerable. Ishikawa-san's father was one of those. On Ishikawa-san's first day of school, she found a dead, bloated rat in her desk.

Despite Ishikawa-san's standoffish personality, Professor Noto and the rest of the Ikeda Journalism Club befriended her, and she became a standout member of the club. Ishikawa-san was bright, with an eye for details and a keen memory for rules, having spent many a night with her head buried in law books to help her father avoid small violations that would be a police officer's pretext for arrest. Professor Noto described Ishikawa-san's writing style as "direct and unforgiving," lacking in the usual journalistic eloquence but all the more powerful for it. Ishikawa-san wrote about the baseball team's narrow defeat at the Summer Koshien Tournament—about the boys' anguish and anger over a blown call on a play at the plate—and won an award.

Through her last two years of high school, Ishikawa-san became interested in the law and justice, and she finally had the support of people around her to pursue that interest. She went on to study law at Nagoya and joined the Japan Legal Support Center, a government agency for defending indigent and underprivileged clients. She'd taken a full-time position in Nagano, and that was when she came in contact with Professor Noto once again. After years out of touch, the two women resumed their friendship and became interested in the process of rehabilitation. They collaborated on sending clients and colleagues to Professor Noto's clinic to volunteer. "Suo wanted nothing more than to see some of the people who grew up like she did get out of that life and be free to live as they choose," said the professor. "It meant the world to her."

But over the last few months, Counselor Ishikawa had gone quiet. She'd taken a leave of absence from the JLSC, handed off her cases, and moved to a new house. Professor Noto had found this turn surprising. Counselor Ishikawa's behavior struck her as erratic and evasive, and despite her best efforts to confront her friend, the lawyer wouldn't talk about her state of mind or her intentions. "She reminded me of herself back in high school, when I first met her—holding everything in until it burst," the professor explained. "I pushed her pretty hard, but she wouldn't spill. I thought the only thing I could do was give her space."

* * *

Once Professor Noto uttered the name _Ishikawa_, Inspector Yamato had one of her men looking up the attorney in a local database, but to that point, Counselor Ishikawa hadn't been positively identified as my kidnapper. We had only Professor Noto's word. The police subjected me to a photo lineup to no avail; with the mask she'd been wearing, I couldn't pick her out.

While some detectives were assigned to search the lawyer's case files, Kudo-kun, Inspector Yamato, Amari-san, Professor Agasa, and I visited the JLSC Nagano district office in Monzen Plaza, just a few blocks east of prefectural police headquarters. There, we got in touch with a supervising attorney, Counselor Kaizaki, who had worked with Counselor Ishikawa on her last set of cases. Counselor Kaizaki couldn't tell us much more about Counselor Ishikawa's departure, only that it was sudden and that she was still technically employed by the JLSC, though if she stayed on leave much longer they would have to replace her. He did think Counselor Ishikawa's behavior had been erratic of late, but that in itself hadn't struck him as unusual. "Suo-kun's always had ups and downs," he said, puzzled by the situation. "She always came back from the downs before." But in the last few months she'd clearly been stressed by something. He'd chalked it up to overwork; they were all overworked, with too little money and time to help every client. In hindsight, he wondered if his own state of overwork had made him inattentive.

Though Counselor Kaizaki had no insight into why Counselor Ishikawa left, he did know the accomplice, the former detective Nishina, who had been working as a private investigator since his forced retirement from the police. Detective Nishina had assisted Counselor Ishikawa with investigations on a few cases, including one involving a battered woman seeking evidence of financial malfeasance from her husband. Counselor Kaizaki had had Detective Nishina assigned to other attorneys on staff lately because he thought Nishina and Ishikawa had more than a professional relationship. He didn't know anything for sure, but he'd been told a few people had seen the two of them together at a pub not far from the office. That was enough, in his mind, to necessitate reassigning Nishina. The integrity of the office was at stake. They had to prevent a conflict of interest.

The five of us headed to the pub, Sumibiyaki Chidori, across the street from Counselor Ishikawa's office. The bartender on duty had seen Counselor Ishikawa and Detective Kaizaki before, and while she didn't like to eavesdrop on her patrons' conversations, she didn't think the two of them were romantically involved—just close friends or colleagues. They did meet frequently, until a couple months prior, when they both stopped coming. That was right around the time that Counselor Ishikawa took her leave.

* * *

Detective Nishina hadn't said much while in police custody, but a visit from Inspector Yamato and Kudo-kun changed that. Armed with evidence of Nishina's relationship with Counselor Ishikawa—and the risk that Nishina's wife would find out about his close ties to another woman—the detectives broke Nishina's resistance. He admitted having become friendly with Counselor Ishikawa, though he insisted it was not romantic in nature. "She was one of us," he explained. "She put everything she had into fighting the good fight."

But it was more than just her attitude that got Detective Nishina's attention. He'd been let go from the police for a reason: longstanding post-traumatic stress from a use-of-force incident. In firing at an armed gunman, one of Detective Nishina's bullets had ricocheted off a concrete block and killed a bystander. He was not judged at fault for this; the police inquest and the coroner ruled it was a freak accident, and Nishina hadn't known that his bullet had killed a man until weeks later. Still, the memory of that afternoon had haunted him. The police settled his case, feeling he couldn't continue to work unless he showed great improvement through treatment. He took up working as a private investigator, which was how he met Counselor Ishikawa. He didn't know how she learned of his traumatic past. "She only said that word gets around," he remembered, but he suspected she'd looked into it more deeply, more than she'd let on.

They talked about his incident over the course of a few weeks, until Counselor Ishikawa suggested he use Leze to help blot out the memory. Nishina did some research of his own, finding that the results were promising, in spite of Ishikawa's caution that it wasn't a cure-all. "I made myself relive that memory," he explained, according to Ishikawa's instructions, and the next day, it was hazier to him. He couldn't quite remember what the shooter looked like or the sound of his own gunshot, which had long stuck with him. He continued treating himself, without a prescription, in this manner for weeks until all those audiovisual details were gone.

"I used to dream about it a lot," he explained to us. "Almost every night. Even when I was awake, loud noises would remind me of it. Now, I sleep fine. I'm relaxed. I can make love to my wife. I can play with my children. I'm whole again." His expression darkened. "I thought that would be enough for Ishikawa-san, but she wanted to do more."

Counselor Ishikawa had recruited him for her scheme. He'd found the idea repugnant at first, but as he felt the burden of memory lifted from him, he started feeling guilty that he could be free while others still suffered. Knowing how skeptical he'd been at first, he readily believed that few others would willingly listen to Counselor Ishikawa, and her system of treatment was, at best, unlicensed medicine. Feeling that she might take action whether he was involved or not, he agreed to help her.

"No one was harmed," he insisted. "We made sure they were all fed and had plenty of water. What we staged were interventions."

If he had been so integral in ensuring the safety of each target, what would Counselor Ishikawa do after his capture? Detective Nishina couldn't say. They'd never talked about specific plans, even though the danger of being caught hung over them. "She never had a plan to escape. To be honest, I don't know what she'll do now."

* * *

Counselor Ishikawa had been destroying the evidence.

Detective Nishina pointed us to the attorney's new home, a small house on the outskirts of Chikuma. It was isolated and off the main road, suitable for the attorney's desire for privacy. Once the police had cleared the scene, Inspector Yamato allowed us to participate in a search of the premises. We found that Counselor Ishikawa had been busy since her accomplice's capture: she'd magnetized and smashed a hard drive, emptied her file cabinets, and thrown all the paper documents into the bathtub with a solution of water and bleach. She'd mashed the slush with a plunger, ensuring that the documents and bleach mixed evenly.

What Counselor Ishikawa had not destroyed were the cork bulletin board in the garage, a dozen empty boxes of Leze, and the mortar and pestle she'd used to grind the drug down into a fine powder. In the time since Professor Noto had last heard from her, the attorney had kept herself busy—and focused on her new cause. The house in Chikuma was stark in its lack of decoration. There was one room with a computer, desk, and file cabinets. The living room had only two stools. The refrigerator door was covered in takeout menus, and the cupboards were bare.

Over the next few hours, the police attempted to recover the destroyed documents from the bathtub and determine where Counselor Ishikawa might've gone. Her car was missing, and while Detective Nishina knew the make and model, he couldn't tell us about the license plate.

The only other person to have recent contact with Counselor Ishikawa was a real estate agent, Hayasaka Rena. Hayasaka-san had gone to school with Counselor Ishikawa as well and had lost touch with her for some time until recently, when Counselor Ishikawa asked about buying her new home in Chikuma. Hayasaka-san was a commercial agent, with a portfolio spanning all of Nagano City and the surrounding towns, so she couldn't help personally with a residential purchase, but that pretext helped Counselor Ishikawa rebuild their relationship, and Hayasaka-san helped the counselor research potential sites to hold captives—unwittingly, she maintained. "I thought she was going to start a business," Hayasaka-san explained. "She seemed confident about it, so I didn't ask too many questions, but it did bother me when she seemed to ask about different kinds of properties. I wasn't sure what type of business she wanted to start."

Hayasaka-san wasn't the only person to claim she was duped. Professor Noto, too, wondered if Counselor Ishikawa had been planning her abductions for some time. Their collaboration to find volunteers for the clinic had marked Amari-san, Tsuruya-san, and me as potential targets, but Professor Noto "never had an inkling" that Counselor Ishikawa would do something like this.

"She could lash out at people reflexively, but a calculated attempt to inflict suffering on another person?" The professor shook her head. "That's not her. Before this, I would've said she's more likely to punish herself."

Counselor Ishikawa liked cycling and rock climbing. The police searched through the pamphlets on her refrigerator, looking for a potential outlet for her stress. Instead, Kudo-kun found a menu for the Hibiki Family Bakery.

* * *

The widow Yamadera was still tidying up for the night when we arrived at the bakery. She recognized a photo of Counselor Ishikawa, who'd been by several times to buy gyoza. She didn't know the counselor by name or anything about her and was surprised to hear that this woman was a friend of Professor Noto's. "She never mentioned it," said Yamadera-san. "Maybe it was a coincidence that she came?"

Counselor Ishikawa had stopped by in the mid-afternoon. She did not buy gyoza, contrary to Yamadera-san's expectations, instead enjoying a cup of tea and some red bean pastries. She'd asked whether business had been good (it hadn't been, but the bakery had endured harder times) and made a small remark about Yamadera-san's family. Of course, Yamadera-san's husband had died before they could have children, and Yamadera-san had never remarried. She was on good terms with her sister, though, and she saw her nieces quite regularly. One of them was old enough to start helping in the bakery, and Yamadera-san had trained aspiring chefs and bakers over the years, seeing them start their own restaurants or pursue other careers. They were all family, too, just of a different sort.

Yamadera-san had volunteered that much because she sensed Counselor Ishikawa might want to talk about something, but the counselor clammed up, thanked Yamadera-san for the meal, and went on her way.

With the trail having gone cold again, the investigators split up. Inspector Yamato got on the phone with local dispatchers to make sure the area around the bakery was monitored, in case Counselor Ishikawa showed her face again. While the police canvassed the area, Professor Noto suggested we head toward the old high school. There were numerous hiding places that the young Ishikawa Suo had liked to seclude herself in, and most of them were around the school, on the west side of the Chikuma River.

As we crossed the Chikuma River on the Route 403 bridge, we found her. Counselor Ishikawa stood on the south side of the bridge, by the white supporting arch where the pedestrian path widened briefly. Her proximity to the arch made her harder to see from the roadway, but we learned later that one or two passers-by had called the police suspecting she might harm herself. We found her leaning on the railing, and when we approached her with the police in tow, she made no move to flee.

"Took you long enough," she said.


	19. Surrender

Counselor Ishikawa was candid in her interview with the police, sparing no details about her plots. She'd relied heavily on Detective Nishina to help her research her targets. Former colleagues trusted Nishina and supplied him with information even when it was off-book and without sanction. Counselor Ishikawa had buried herself in the details of her targets' lives. She'd followed Amari-san for two weeks, learning every aspect of her daily commute, and she'd broken into Amari-san's apartment to retrieve the pair of bloodied scissors that Amari-san had kept by her bed.

Many of these details had come not from sifting through countless files but through talks with Professor Noto, who had made it her business to know friends' and colleagues' deepest secrets and to try to help them in her own way. Professor Noto had offered opportunities for penance at the clinic. Counselor Ishikawa, in her opinion, had only gone one step further: to force people into healing, even if they wouldn't want it.

Professor Noto found this characterization grotesque, likening it to forcing a victim of sexual assault to press charges and testify regardless of their wishes. "So we must pursue justice for mankind, even when, in that pursuit, we must be unjust to a man?" she said. "What's the point of that?"

As the details of Counselor Ishikawa's depravity came to light, Professor Noto's shock faded to dull horror. I'd once regarded her as having a witty retort for every occasion, poised in the face of even utter failure. One time, an undergrad started a chemical fire in her lab, and while she was annoyed at the lost time and money, she quipped that she was sad someone else had beaten her to the fire extinguisher. That Professor Noto seemed like a distant memory.

It was out of sympathy that Kudo-kun offered to take Professor Noto, and our other guests, to dinner. It was evening, and while the interrogation of Counselor Ishikawa would continue, Kudo-kun was hopeful there was no more of a threat to us. None of us had eaten since lunch, and we were all exhausted from traveling all across town and from the series of revelations that had shaken us, so Kudo-kun took us to the Metropolitan, arranging for a private table. Though he cared about mysteries first and foremost, Kudo-kun was sympathetic to victims and to people affected by the consequences of human cruelty. He entertained Amari-san with stories of chasing Kaito Kid on a grand caper in Yokohama, and he took Professor Noto's mind off Counselor Ishikawa's betrayal by asking about her mountaineering hobby. Professor Agasa spoke for a little while about the smartphone apps he'd been working on, the best of which was an innovative control system for camera drones. It was only for an hour or so that we could put aside what we'd been through, but it was a nice reminder that we'd once had lives outside of this ordeal, and in a few months' or a year's time, what Counselor Ishikawa had done to us would be but a memory.

After dinner, Amari-san and Professor Noto headed home, but Professor Agasa and I went upstairs to Kudo-kun's room. My apartment was still a crime scene, and in any event it wasn't comfortable enough for the Professor to stay. The stairs wouldn't have been good for him. Kudo-kun and I had agreed to let the Professor stay the night in the hotel, and I would keep him company. The Professor would be given the bed, of course. Kudo-kun offered me a choice, and I asked for a futon. He took the sofa.

Deciding on sleeping arrangements was much easier than sleeping. I didn't like the idea of sleeping in the same room as Kudo-kun, but paying for an extra room would've been impractical and costly. I'd already slept a lot during the morning, and it's unnatural to sleep so soon again. My arm ached, and I would feel the spot where Counselor Ishikawa had tied my wrist to the pole. The skin was tender and irritated. It would be days until it healed, but it would heal with, at most, a small mark that no one else would notice. Most scars are like that, aren't they? An old wound can be mistaken for a birthmark, and most cuts, bruises, and scrapes heal with no noticeable trace, but you remember them. I remember, when I was still dangerously attached to Gin, that I once begged him to let me drive his car. I was a young fool back then who thought to test just how fond he was of me. The end of his cigarette told me even his love had limits. No one drives Gin's car, or they get burned.

How convenient it would've been to forget all that. I think Counselor Ishikawa could've persuaded more people to accept her offer if she'd gone about it another way. Bombarding someone with a record of her past sins and torments—that just makes her defiant. It's in the quiet moments, when everything should be normal, when the moonlight comes through the window but she can't sleep—that's when she might wish to forget.

Of course, for any reasonable human being, that sentiment passes quickly. I know I've been damaged. I know I've been twisted. I'd floundered, like Counselor Ishikawa had, looking for a solution to myself—a solution that didn't exist. I'd come to Nagano hoping to make something good from my past and ignored all the warning signs that I was searching for something impossible, that I'd placed my trust in people who had ulterior motives, that I was using others for my own purposes while hiding everything important about myself. What a fool I'd been.

Since I wasn't sleeping anyway, I made some hot chocolate.

"Make some for me, too," said a voice from the couch. Leave it to Kudo-kun to call out at a woman in the dark with no warning. If I hadn't been safe in his hotel room, I would've grabbed my knife. I only learned later that Kudo-kun had been awake the whole time and had known I was awake from listening to my breathing. I strongly reconsidered getting that knife, but I settled for making him a cup extra hot. There are few things worse in the world than sitting over a cup of hot chocolate that's so hot you can't drink it.

Once Kudo-kun burned his tongue a little, he set the mug aside and took a tablet from his bag. He wasn't sleeping much, either; he'd been thinking about the case and Counselor Ishikawa. Though Inspector Yamato had updated him on the interrogation, he read some more about her background, looking for a missing piece that he couldn't be sure existed. I thought he was out of his mind. "Maybe I am," he admitted, but he kept reading anyway. If a case was going to keep him up at night, he might as well do something productive while he was awake, or else he'd really waste his own time. His ex-fiancée hadn't liked it either, but he thought it was the lesser of two evils. I told him he should've distracted himself another way. He'd had a lovely girlfriend who'd been nationally recognized in karate. They could've practiced together, and it would've benefited him personally and professionally. Detectives have to stay in shape and defend themselves, after all. Kudo-kun seemed surprised by the idea, but he conceded that would've been a good thought at the time. "I guess I should've thought harder about something like that before something drastic happened."

I thought so, but I didn't press the issue. His ex was a sore spot for him, and I didn't want to keep talking about her. I moved to the couch, sitting beside him so I could look at the tablet as he did his research. We read through a few of Counselor Ishikawa's court filings. She wasn't the most elegant writer. She had a directness about her words that left no wiggle room. It was aggressive and certain, and more than once she excoriated opponents for bad behavior, even when it might've been handled better with tact and diplomacy. It was, in some sense, easy to imagine her as Professor Noto's friend. Professor Noto could be blunt sometimes and cagey at other times, depending on her patience and what suited her mood.

But most of all, Kudo-kun was interested in Counselor Ishikawa's motives. In her interrogation, the counselor had relied on her self-styled altruism and sense of righteousness. She knew Leze could be effective but that the treatment regimen's approval was being held up for political reasons. She thought that couldn't stand. Kudo-kun wanted to find out more about the regulatory process—who was involved, what was taking so long, and so on. He thought it was strange that Counselor Ishikawa could've undertaken this crusade of hers without Professor Noto knowing. I had misgivings about the professor, too, but it wasn't unusual for friends to have a falling out or drift apart. By all accounts, Counselor Ishikawa had withdrawn from her closest colleagues at JLSC.

"And no one thought something was wrong," Kudo-kun remarked, mystified by the inability of ordinary people to see patterns that were right in front of their faces.

Of course, he was simplifying things. Her boss thought something was unusual. He just didn't do anything about it. It's all too common for people to stay out of matters they don't think they should interfere in, to give respectful space even when that respect can be mistaken for indifference.

"When's the last time you did something like that?" he asked, still skeptical.

I admit I don't remember standing by for something like that, but I could remember all too clearly seeing other people looking back at me, wondering what I was doing and whether they should interfere, as I made a fool of myself.

* * *

Professor Agasa always liked a good party, so when we were invited to a New Year's Eve bash at the Kudo estate, he wasn't about to refuse. He pressed me for days, hoping I would come with him, even though I just wanted to stay home, relax, and study. My friends, the Detective Boys, were going. How could I refuse? Very easily, since I wanted no part of cozying up to actors, critics, and detectives. The Professor was disappointed, but he didn't give up. He started talking about all the appetizers he wanted to try, and I realized no one would watch his health if he went alone. I'd been manipulated by meaner men in the past, but the Professor's jovial smile was no less victorious than them. If I hadn't loved him, I would've found it frightening.

The party at the Kudo compound was a who's-who of Tokyo society, with a smattering of international filmmakers and actors and detectives from all over the country. I realized right away I'd been right to want to avoid it. There were too many people who would ask questions. The Professor was well-known for his gadgetry, but no one was foolish enough to think I was his daughter, and there were too many smart people to deceive with our cover story. I asked the Professor to avoid talking to strangers as much as possible.

That left us drifting through the party as spectators more than participants until we were spotted by one of the hosts, the actress Kudo Yukiko. Yukiko-san was aware of the Professor and me, and she made a point to talk to us, asking the Professor about his latest inventions. She also took an interest in my studies in Nagano, wondering if I'd settled in well. She'd been getting involved in the film industry again, and she thought I could join a production in Nagano, perhaps as a scientific advisor or an extra. I think she just wanted an excuse to harass someone while in town. Kudo Yukiko incessantly inserts herself into other people's lives for her own amusement, but she was also kind enough to show us around and help us fend off any unwanted questions about my background, so we could enjoy the party. She hoped to stop by my apartment in Nagano and offer some furniture or decorations as a gift. I thought accepting that would be only fair.

Yukiko-san shepherded the Professor and me to more private company. Though her husband was making the rounds, their son was the center of attention, along with his newly-announced fiancée. Kudo-kun was glued to her hip for the moment, all too happy to show off the engagement ring he'd given her. Though she was clearly happy about it, all the attention started getting to her. She excused herself from a crowd of guests to talk with the Professor and me, asking if we were comfortable. The Professor congratulated her, and she beamed with joy, but she was a host first and foremost. Rather than bask in the moment, she went to get us some punch. The Professor offered to help her, and I let them go off together. There were too many strange people I could meet at a punch table. As long as I stayed close to the Kudo family, I'd be protected, so I stayed put.

What I didn't expect was that Kudo-kun would excuse himself from the other guests to talk to me. He was far from a gracious or charming host, acting irritated as soon as he saw me. "So you decided to come after all," he remarked. "Tired of hiding out at home with your computer?"

I explained I'd come at the Professor's urging, nothing more, but of course he wasn't satisfied with that.

"Come on," he said, motioning for me to follow. There was someone he wanted me to meet—an academic from Nagoya with an interest in crime novels and forensic science. Kudo-kun thought I'd enjoy chatting with this man and that it might lead to a job opportunity down the road. Kudo-kun didn't know much about my research, but this professor he knew was a fan of his father's, so it seemed like a golden opportunity.

But I didn't follow. "I'll pass," I said.

He folded his arms and shot me a disapproving look. "What's with you being a stick in the mud? This is a party."

At least nobody notices a stick in the mud if there are more interesting things around. I didn't need people asking questions about me, and that's exactly what people were doing with _him_ because he'd had the nerve to propose to his girlfriend and throw a huge party to celebrate it.

Kudo-kun insisted the party wasn't his idea, but his parents were thrilled—thrilled enough to come back from the States for it—and he wasn't about to turn them down. It was a joyous occasion, after all, and he felt it was the right time. It'd been almost three years since we'd come out of hiding. He'd waited to see if things would settle down. He thought he'd waited long enough.

Of course he thought that way. When he'd decided to come out of hiding, he hadn't done it gradually. He hadn't waited more than an hour before running around looking for cases. Kudo Shinichi was _back_, and people _had to know_. That was good for him, but it wasn't good for me. The more people who sniffed around him, wondering why he'd been gone for so long, the more chance there was someone would find out about his involvement with my sister—and me. I'd gotten over him being himself. I couldn't stop him from being a detective. It would've been more suspicious if he'd given that up, but he didn't need to make a spectacle of all this. He didn't need to have a public engagement and wedding. He needed to be quiet—for his own sake and mine—and he could've waited a year or two longer, just to be sure that he and his precious girlfriend would be safe.

I thought he would make excuses. I thought he would brush off my concerns, saying I was being too cautious and paranoid, but I misjudged him.

"No," he said flatly. "This is the time. I put my life on hold for over three years now. I've waited long enough."

"That's not logical," I told him. "That's recklessness. That's letting your feelings get the better of you. I know she's your weak spot, but this is too much! You're not the only one at risk here. She's at risk, and so am I."

"We agreed we could take that risk."

"You did," I said, "even though I have to deal with all this attention now. I'm so glad the two of you agreed on it."

"Don't talk like this just because you don't approve!"

"Clearly it doesn't matter whether I approve because you make stupid decisions anyway!"

"This is my party! Don't try to throw cold water on it."

By that point, some murmurings had gone through the room. People were staring. Who is she? they wondered. What was all this about?

Kudo Yukiko took her son aside, saying with the most polite smile that could kill everything in a hundred-meter radius that, while it may have been his party, I was a guest and I should be treated as such. She offered to take me on a tour of the grounds, but I wasn't in the mood for that. It was Kudo-kun's party. I didn't need to be there, so I left. The Professor could stand one night off his diet. I saw the new year come and go from the comfort of the Professor's home.

And I berated myself for what a fool I'd been. Just because I was afraid of the past coming back for me didn't mean he was, or that he should've been. It had been years, after all, and he was well connected. Friends in high places would warn him if some former operative came out of the woodwork looking for revenge. I benefited from that, too.

More than that, I understood that my opposition to Kudo-kun had been futile. He was always going to move on. It had been just a matter of time. Even if he'd waited five or ten years, nothing would've changed. I'd still be afraid of "dead" or caged men coming to kill me, and I'd never feel that we were 100% safe. He was always going to marry that girl. The only question was _when_. I'd made a scene at his party for nothing, and I wasn't about to be labeled a frantic woman who didn't know when to show a cool head. Kudo-kun had been more angry and combative than I thought he would be toward an ally, toward someone supposedly on his side. That outburst must've been bubbling up inside him for some time, and I'd had a hand in helping it boil over.

So, the next morning, I decided to make something appropriate—zoni soup. After all, _zoni_ is written with the characters for _mixture_ and _boil_. I think it's a fitting New Year's tradition, even though I'm not fond of mochi in soup otherwise.

I was only about halfway through cooking when there was a knock on the Professor's door. Kudo-kun was standing on the doorstep in a robe and slippers. I asked him what he would do if I left him outside to freeze, but he wondered if I would really do that. I wouldn't, but still, the possibility should've crossed his mind.

We didn't speak for some time while I finished the zoni. If I hadn't known better, I would say he'd taken an interest in the preparations. In reality, he was just an awkward man when it came to personal matters, so inelegant when it came to speaking from the heart compared to how concisely he could put a string of facts together into a conclusion. He was still tongue-tied when I put a bowl of soup in front of him, and I thought he might leave without saying anything that mattered, but he refused to eat before speaking his mind.

"I'm sorry," he said at last.

"I'm sorry, too," I said, and I pushed the bowl toward him.

He took a cautious sip, appraising it like he was some master food critic. "Not bad," he said.

Not bad? I expected more than that. For his information, it was amazing. It was the best zoni he'd ever had, and I would settle for nothing less than that.

"Look who's full of herself all of a sudden," he remarked.

I scowled at him, but he kept eating, and he didn't complain, so he must've liked it.

We didn't talk about serious matters until we were finished with breakfast. Kudo-kun swore he would consult me on matters that affected my safety and his, just like I wanted, and I promised I wouldn't overreact. Our behavior at the party aside, we could still look out for each other. I had faith he would do just that, so long as he didn't get distracted, because Kudo-kun was that type of person—full of moral imperatives that didn't allow him to be selfish. He would do the same for anyone. I said as much, but he protested that wasn't the only reason.

"You'd do the same for me, right?" he said.

"If you're asking me to live and die with your name breathlessly on the tip of my tongue, that's quite egotistical of you, don't you think?" I said.

"You're such a bitch."

"So what if I am?" I said, putting the pot of zoni in his arms for him to take back to his lovely fiancée. He'd have to carry it all himself.

He rolled his eyes. "I'm counting on you," he said.

"Yeah, yeah," I said. The most I would do was hold the door for him on his way out.

* * *

The difference between Kudo-kun and Professor Noto was that Kudo-kun wasn't the type to let people go easily. Despite being a solitary creature, he maintained steady connections with other people and didn't like to see them disrupted. He was sensitive to small changes in his equilibrium, and he was reluctant to see it disturbed.

So while we sat on the couch in his hotel room, listening to the wee hours of the morning tick away, the most Kudo Shinichi would do was hold on to my hand. "I'm here," he said, not looking at me. "No one's coming after you."

I'd once had nightmares frequently, thinking of the evil that old colleagues and so-called friends would do if they ever found me, but on that quiet, moonlit night, those old ghosts stayed at rest. It was just Kudo-kun and me and the soft blue glow of his laptop screen, which faced away from us as he'd put it aside. It was just like him to think of acting nobly first.

"Do you miss her in times like this?" I asked.

He sighed. "I missed her every day, but lately, I've started to think it's all right? At least, I think so." He laughed to himself bitterly. "I don't know anything about this stuff, you know?"

"I know," I said.

"Cases are easy," he went on, "but it's the rest of the time that's hard—hard for me, but hard for people around me, too."

She had be there for him, night after night, even as he struggled to talk about what he'd seen, even as evidence and witness statements kept churning through his mind. Sometimes he'd had epiphanies in the middle of the night and leave. She'd been patient, but it wore her down.

I never asked him about her breaking point, but he didn't blame her for it, and he'd done his best to keep going after the end of the engagement, but he clearly missed that bond, even though he wouldn't speak much about it. He'd missed it and tried not to let go of it. "If you'd asked me, just a month or two ago, I would've said I couldn't see being with anyone else. I think only in the last few weeks have I seriously begun to imagine it, but it still doesn't feel real to me."

"Then don't just imagine it," I said, resting my head on his shoulder. "Make it real."

Kudo-kun looked back at me with a serious, contemplative expression. Tentatively, he ran a finger through a tangle in my hair, trying straightening it out. He leaned in. His breath tickled my lips. I closed my eyes, and we shared a kiss in the dark.

* * *

Of course, the world of adulthood is slow-moving. To make a new reality for the two of us would be like trying to move the earth with nothing more than a firecracker. Such a change would be measurable only after some time.

In the morning, Kudo-kun laid a kiss on me before asking forgiveness. The case was over; he needed to go back to Tokyo. He promised to call, of course, and he'd take the Professor with him, making sure the old man got home safely. Kudo-kun hoped I would stop by Tokyo before the holidays, and we could continue where we were leaving off. I couldn't promise anything, having fallen so far behind in my work, but I could try—as long as he would come to Nagano more often than once every five years.

I had mixed feelings about Kudo-kun's return to Tokyo. The weekend was coming up, and he could've stayed a few more days, but at the same time, I was eager to get back to the rest of my life, too, and to see the Ishikawa case put to rest. Kudo-kun's interest in me was going to take some time to get used to.

Before leaving town, Kudo-kun took the Professor and me back to police headquarters to meet one last time with Inspector Yamato. Counselor Ishikawa had spent the night in custody, answering questions about her plot, and the police were satisfied, but Kudo-kun was not. The counselor had been vague about her motives, saying that the parade of victims who'd come to her attention had worn her down, and she couldn't say when she'd decided to act. She was also evasive answering how she knew that a dosage of Leze would help inhibit memories of trauma. She claimed this was common, public knowledge, but Kudo-kun found that studies of Leze's effects on memory, outside of strictly structured treatments, were inconclusive.

We asked Professor Noto what Counselor Ishikawa would know about Leze, and the professor said she had no idea. Counselor Ishikawa was a defense attorney, mostly working with the accused, not victims, though there were cases in which the distinctions blurred. The professor herself was a research scientist, not a doctor. She would never have come up with this unsanctioned regimen. That wasn't her job.

"Is there any other reason why Counselor Ishikawa would've been interested in Leze?" Kudo-kun asked.

"Not that I know of," said Professor Noto.

"When did she learn that you were working on such a drug?" he continued.

"I don't know."

"Did you ever tell her?"

"I don't remember specifically doing so."

Those answers were starkly at odds with Counselor Ishikawa's recollection. She thought Professor Noto had been very proud of her work, and they'd spoken about it often. This discrepancy didn't escape Kudo-kun's attention. There was still something there, something the professor or Counselor Ishikawa wanted to keep from us. He asked Inspector Yamato to get him more information—everything about Professor Noto's work, her relationship with Counselor Ishikawa, and the professor's contacts in industry and medicine who'd helped develop treatments using Leze. Kudo-kun was staying in Nagano, at least for the timebeing, and he wanted my help.

"I know you've lost a lot of time already," he said to me, "but you know her research better than anyone else here."

"Is that all?" I said.

He blushed. "And, well, it's a reason for us to spend some more time together."

As much as I would've liked that, he did have affairs to take care of at home. I would be fine. Even if there were one small part of this case that was unresolved, did it really have to be Kudo Shinichi who solved it?

"It doesn't have to be me," he said, "but it still bugs me. If that bothers you, I understand."

It didn't bother me; I knew that was the kind of person he was. You can't tell a consummate detective to stop working a case when it's still hot. There was nothing I could say to dissuade him. It was pointless to think otherwise; trying would've only made things worse. In the end, Kudo-kun finds out anything he wants to know, and even people he loves are powerless to keep him from looking.

Kudo-kun wanted a summary of Professor Noto's research, as well as that of her students over the years, and I provided that for him. I went all the way back to her graduate school days as she first began to explore the biochemistry of memory formation. I found the series of papers that studied the active ingredient in Leze. I included marginally related works such as Amari-san's research in functionality of different parts of the brain.

And at the end of the packet, I stapled a little-known paper about targeting cancer cells in the brain and selectively destroying them with a previously-unknown mechanism for apoptosis. It was a long, obscure paper because the chemical pathways for this mechanism of apoptosis had to be explained in great detail. After all, there was no support for it in the literature. It'd sprung from nothing, proposed by a second-year student of Professor Noto's who'd done no research at other institutions. It was a miraculous flash of insight—at least, as far as anyone else was concerned—but I knew, better than anyone, that drug was no miracle. The mere mention of it was a grave mistake not even Kudo-kun could forgive.


	20. Three Stories

I expected Kudo-kun to confront me about my research, but if he'd noticed the last paper in the list of references I'd provided, he must've decided not to ask me about it. We went through a dull afternoon of combing through old records and police reports, trying to understand what Professor Noto and Counselor Ishikawa were hiding. Having come up empty in our search, we'd settled for identifying their common friends and associates—colleagues at the clinic, members of the high school journalism club, and so on—and decided on interviewing those witnesses the next day. Kudo-kun seemed annoyed that he hadn't made more progress, but it didn't weigh him down. Partway through the afternoon, he bought two tickets to a theater on a whim. He and I would see a rakugo performance late the next week. I pointed out to him I hadn't agreed to such a thing and I might have plans. "Come on," he said, shooting me an unamused look. "Are you trying to play hard-to-get?"

"I'm impossible to get," I said, "unless the person trying to 'get' me is particularly brilliant."

"I'll take that as a compliment," he said with a knowing grin.

I folded my arms coolly. "Only a few women would put up with such an arrogant man, you know."

"You have the patience of a saint," he said. It was a near-perfect performance, but there were hints of restrained laughter encroaching on his attempt at a straight face.

Looking back, I think that was the happiest and most carefree the two of us could ever be. Kudo-kun enjoyed word games and trying to bamboozle people with blatant lies. I didn't mind a little deception now and then myself. It was childish, yes—like pulling on someone's hair to get their attention—but there was a thrill to it as well. How far can you go, acting more and more ridiculous, before you provoke a sincere reaction? How much do you trust that what you're seeing is an act, isn't real, and is all part of the game?

In the end I couldn't take it much further. "Don't hurt yourself," I said, and I accepted the ticket, putting an end to that round of our little game. If we'd kept score, it would've been a point for Kudo-kun, but it wouldn't have been a cause for celebration. This was a game in which if someone concedes a round, it's a loss for everyone.

* * *

Around ten, the four of us—Kudo-kun, the Professor, Amari-san, and I—headed back to Chikuma to interview Professor Noto's longtime friend and neighbor, Watanabe Satoru. An engineer with JR East, Watanabe-san was a stocky man with rectangular glasses. He invited the four of us to his study, a private library of technical documents ranging from bridge-building to rocketry. He was direct and blunt—a man of few words—but such people don't always tell the truth, and their silence can be just as informative as a string of lies.

Watanabe-san had grown up with Professor Noto. In his childhood, he'd been athletic and competitive. He'd been a member of his middle school wrestling team, but he felt like he didn't fit in with that group of people. Many of them were loud and brutish. Watanabe-san had more in common with his father—an electrical engineer—and Professor Noto, who had been interested in nature and ecology. Though Watanabe-san had a wife and two sons, he wasn't shy about saying that Professor Noto had been, and still was, a close friend.

It was Professor Noto who'd wanted to join the school newspaper, and she'd convinced him to follow her. He'd been skeptical at first, but he came to appreciate that journalism involved backing up assertions of truth with evidence and facts. In that way, journalism wasn't so different from science or engineering, and since he felt clumsy with words, he saw writing for the paper as an opportunity to improve himself. Beyond that, being in the same club let him spend time with Professor Noto, whose energy and ambition he admired—among other things about her.

The arrival of Ishikawa Suo changed that. Watanabe-san had been wary of Counselor Ishikawa, thinking her dangerous and a bad influence. Professor Noto had been, in his mind, misguided to try to change a bad girl from a yakuza family into a model citizen. Counselor Ishikawa was gruff and standoffish with him, but over time, they'd formed a truce, tolerating each other's presence without fighting—at least, not in front of Professor Noto, and not in a way that would disrupt the club.

As one of the members of the Ikeda Journalism Club with Counselor Ishikawa and Professor Noto, Watanabe-san had a unique perspective on their interactions, and Kudo-kun hoped he would shed light on why Counselor Ishikawa had abducted three people and why Professor Noto had lied for her.

Watanabe-san was unsure. Back in school, Professor Noto had been uniquely receptive to Counselor Ishikawa, humoring her and accepting requests from her when she might've been more even-handed with others.

"Did Professor Noto ever talk to you about her invention, Leze?" asked Kudo-kun.

Watanabe-san knew a little about it, and he could think of no reason why Professor Noto would lie about it. The focus of her work wasn't a secret, but she also avoided talking about it, focusing on the general thrust of her work with memory formation. The idea of affecting someone's memory disturbed Watanabe-san, and he thought others would feel the same. He imagined that was why Professor Noto wouldn't talk about it much. If Counselor Ishikawa had been involved, then perhaps the two of them had conspired to offer the drug to one of the attorney's clients. Counselor Ishikawa was known for working with victims of abuse, accidents, and other traumas. They were people who would want to forget, and offering such a treatment without involving a psychiatrist would've been unethical—at least, according to the letter of the law. Of course, Watanabe-san had no specific knowledge of such a thing. He was only speculating. "But it would be just like Minori," he said, "to fall on her sword for Ishikawa."

Pressed to explain, Watanabe-san thought it went back to Counselor Ishikawa's introduction to the club. Yamadera-sensei, their advisor, had introduced her to the rest of the group, and she'd been quite close and trusting with him—more trusting with him than with any other student or teacher. Watanabe-san felt that Professor Noto began to look after Counselor Ishikawa as well, especially after Yamadera-sensei's death.

"Don't get me wrong," said Watanabe-san, "Sensei was a good man. He was on the right side of things, and I admired him, but those two…" He frowned, trying to find the right words. "It was nothing improper, but they were as loyal to him as anyone could be."

"You all seem to have a great respect for Yamadera-sensei despite the rumors," I observed. "You never doubted his innocence?"

"Never," said Watanabe-san, already irritated with the idea. "It was all empty talk. He was an outsider. They didn't like him."

"I'm sure you admired your teacher," said Professor Agasa, "but with respect, that doesn't mean those people were wrong about him. You yourself said you thought his relationships with Professor Noto and Counselor Ishikawa were strange. Are you sure there wasn't something more to it?"

"He was not a predator!" Watanabe-san pounded his fist on the table. "If the principal and the school board had actually talked to his family, they would've known that!"

A silence fell over the room. Blood drained from Watanabe-san's cheeks as the four of us stared at him. He tried to look at a wall, as if the words that had come out of his mouth could be forgotten so easily, but Kudo-kun wasn't about to allow that.

"When did you talk to his family?"

Watanabe-san cleared his throat. "Thinking back about all this has made me very tired. Excuse me. When you're finished with your tea, my wife will see you out."

Kudo-kun was on the phone with Inspector Yamato before Watanabe-san even left the room. It wasn't the lead Kudo-kun had been hoping for, but Professor Noto's involvement with Yamadera-sensei was another piece of the puzzle that had yet to fit into place, and while Kudo-kun was wary of pursuing too many leads at once, Watanabe-san's outburst made it seem like we were close to something important. Inspector Yamato was all too happy to enlist Kudo-kun's help. Though Yamadera-sensei's profile had some court documents sealed, she could tell us that he was originally born _Onoya Ryo_ and that he had filed for a legal name change, being adopted by relatives on his mother's side, becoming _Yamadera_. Those relatives' last known address was in the file from twenty years before in Osaka, and only local records would tell where the Yamadera family had gone since.

Kudo-kun finished off the tea Watanabe-san had offered with a satisfied smile, and he looked to each of the three of us—Professor Agasa, Amari-san, and me. "Well?" he said. "Who's up for a trip to Osaka?"

* * *

There's something to be said for having a rich acquaintance—or boyfriend—bankroll your travel plans. Tickets for the green car are a definite step up from economy class. With the four of us going together—Kudo-kun generously paid for us to come along—the accommodations were perfect. Since seats were grouped together in fours, with two facing forward and two facing backward in the same group, we were truly taking this trip together.

Of course, traveling with others means you're at the mercy of their quirks, but the four of us had little trouble passing the time. Amari-san and I had work to do, so we were on our laptops for most of the trip. If not for the scenery rushing past the windows, it would've been like another day in the lab, with the two of us side-by-side, pecking away at our keyboards. If anything, it was a more flexible arrangement. Without a cubicle divider between us, Amari-san could share a figure she'd drafted for a paper without having to walk all the way around into my private space. I gave her a few pointers—the software scientists use for making documents is arcane and counterintuitive on good days—and it saved her some time and hassle. She was grateful, and Kudo-kun, sitting across from me, looked on with an amused expression. I demanded an explanation, but he brushed it off, saying that he'd never seen me act like a good sempai before. "What do I have to do to be treated so gently?" he said coyly.

"If you come to me sincerely, seeking my wisdom and expertise, and acknowledge me as your superior, then maybe I'll be gentle with you," I said.

Kudo-kun shot Amari-san a look. "Is that so?"

Amari-san shook her head, holding back a laugh, and she took out a coin pouch. "Whenever she puts on airs like that," Amari-san explained, "make sure she pays up."

I put a fifty-yen coin in the pouch, and Amari-san was already looking forward to buying a nice can of coffee from the vending machine at the lab. Kudo-kun's grin was wider than the Pacific Ocean, but he kept his thoughts to himself. He had work to do as well, preferring to read from a tablet while also exchanging messages with a contact in Osaka. Though I hadn't counted on Amari-san betraying me like that, on the whole it was a pleasant ride. Kudo-kun and Amari-san got along well once she'd shaken off her awestruck daze. That's a small comfort in life—knowing that one important relationship won't clash with another. At the same time, I also thought it was a little sad. If things between Kudo-kun and me soured, Amari-san would be hurt, too.

* * *

Our contact in Osaka was none other than Hattori Heiji. Though some people see Hattori-san and Kudo-kun as rivals, in my opinion they were natural friends. Yes, they were competitive with each other to the core and argued incessantly over who deserved the most credit for cases they worked together, but I couldn't imagine either of them spending so much breath on someone they considered a foe. More than that, they were genuinely interested in each other's lives. The first words out of Hattori-san's mouth when he met us at the station were, "Where's the girl who's stolen Kudo?"

Hattori-san was quick to accuse Kudo-kun of letting his heart get the best of him. We heard all about Kudo-kun's ill-fated romance with his ex, about their impulsive kiss on the stage of Kiyomizu-dera, and so on. In Hattori-san's opinion, it would've been just like Kudo-kun to leap headlong into a relationship during another trip to Osaka, but I made clear we were not impulsive children, and if Hattori-san's love life had waned while raising his son, that was his fault, not ours, and he should find some trashy romance novel or drama to entertain himself instead of butting into our business. Though Hattori-san was taken aback, Kudo-kun backed me up, saying that Hattori-san's wife might show more interest if Hattori-san helped around the house more and didn't spend so much time on cases. Hattori-san seemed bewildered that Kudo-kun and I were ganging up on him, and I was sure he would think of ways to drive a wedge between us, just to see if he could, but we had work to do and more important matters to tend to.

Hattori-san walked us to his car while briefing us on what he'd found so far. Yamadera-sensei's parents had died in a car accident while he was a teenager, and he'd been taken in by a paternal uncle. That arrangement didn't last long; within a year, Uncle Onoya was arrested and charged with neglect. The young Yamadera-sensei was transferred to a maternal uncle's family instead, along with two other children of Onoya, and eventually took his mother's family name. That was the official story, but Hattori-san suspected there was more to it. Court documents were scant on details, and given laws to protect the identities of children in official records, there wasn't much we could ask the investigators without being stonewalled. To get more information, Hattori-san suggested talking to one of Yamadera's cousins—an adoptive sibling from when he was taken in for the second time. That woman, who'd married a fishery executive named _Kotobuki_, agreed to meet with us that day.

Kotobuki-san received us in her office during a lunch break at her charity. She was happy to help answer questions, but she was upfront about knowing less than what we might've hoped. Her parents had shielded her from what was going on, so she only understood what was happening through small signs here and there. Her family had kept in touch with Yamadera-sensei after his parents' accident, but the Onoya branch of the family was secretive and tight-lipped. Even so, Kotobuki-san knew enough to realize her parents were concerned for Yamadera-san's well-being and safety. The children from that household had always been a little antisocial and watched continuously by their parents, rarely coming to family events. Still, to think that the police would have to get involved was shocking.

Though we learned more about what Yamadera-san had been through, the only person in town who would know for sure, and who might speak to us, was Kotobuki-san's mother. Aunt Yamadera lived with one of her sons in Nara, but she was getting old, and the death of Yamadera-sensei had hit her hard. She had rarely spoken of him since. Kotobuki-san didn't know why some of Yamadera-sensei's students might've heard about his background. He'd never told her what he'd endured and while growing up, Kotobuki-san's parents had only talked about it vaguely. _Don't ask him about it,_ they'd insisted. _He's been through enough._ Only Aunt Yamadera, whose husband had died within the last few years, would know more, and Kotobuki-san wasn't sure if we'd be well-received. "She avoids talking about it, even when it comes up," Kotobuki-san explained. "She has a small shrine to Ryo in my brother's house. It's one of the few things she considered non-negotiable about moving into my brother's place. If he'd refused, she'd have gone on her own."

On our way to Nara, the detectives spent considerable thought on how to persuade Aunt Yamadera to talk to us. Though Kotobuki-san arranged a meeting, establishing a comfortable line of conversation would be up to us. Hattori-san argued that we could try spare Aunt Yamadera from reliving all the ugly details, but if push came to shove, we needed to know exactly what Watanabe-san—and, by extension, Professor Noto, Counselor Ishikawa, and the rest of their club—found out.

I felt uncomfortable with Hattori-san's point of view. If he felt something relevant, he would keep digging no matter what? How insensitive. Kudo-kun understood my position, but he largely felt the same way. They were detectives. Their roles in cases were to uncover facts and to present the best known picture of the truth—or to have the wisdom to say that no reliable picture of the truth could be made. To decide not to abstain from potentially crucial details was to confuse the role of the detective and a judge. "We're seekers of fact," Kudo-kun maintained. "We're not supposed to mete out justice." To him, those roles were separated for a reason: those who wish to hand out justice often let their judgments stand in spite of inconvenient facts. To refuse to continue looking into the case for fear of digging up uncomfortable truths—that would be prejudging the relevance of those truths.

Kudo-kun and Hattori-san were right in some respects, but they'd neglected a key consequence of their reasoning. In this case, there was a high chance Aunt Yamadera would not want her nephew's death brought up again. The mere act of doing so, however noble our motives, could dredge up painful memories, yet nowhere in Kudo-kun and Hattori-san's line of thinking had the potential harm to innocents come to mind. I knew they were at least slightly aware of this concept. Kudo-kun had once allowed a murder-suicide case be misunderstood by the public at large to protect the murderer's innocent son. In that case, Kudo-kun had conspired with the police to bring about justice.

"This is different," Hattori-san maintained. "We don't know the truth yet." He looked to Kudo-kun, asking the Detective of the East to back him up, but Kudo-kun was frowning. He stared out the passenger side window, as if searching for an answer from ripples in the clouds or from small perturbations of the cosmic microwave background. Even if he could see those patterns with the naked eye, I doubt they held his answers. Just because something is true and has been since time immemorial doesn't mean it's an answer to some important question. Sometimes things just are the way they are. Sometimes _42_ is just a number. Sometimes, we ascribe too much meaning to happenings that are pure coincidence.

But I should've known better than to think a detective would accept such reasoning. They relentlessly seek what they don't understand, and convincing them to stop, to trust that you know what they don't and that there's nothing good to be found, is impossible.

* * *

Once we arrived in Nara, the detectives worked out their approach. They would let Aunt Yamadera dictate the terms of the encounter, even allowing her to refuse us if the conversation became too intense or painful, so long as we had no reason to believe we were being deceived. In the end, Kudo-kun reasoned, detectives can only seek the truth as long as someone wants it found.

Aunt Yamadera and her son's family had a countryside home in northern Nara. He was a brewery manager and was still out working by the time we arrived. The son's wife greeted us at the gate, and we were shown to a small garden and gazebo, where Aunt Yamadera was waiting for us. There were a few homes in the distance; otherwise, it was greenery and gardens for as far as the eye could see. Aunt Yamadera was in her 70s; she was in good health, but knowing what we'd come to discuss, she felt she needed to be in a calm and peaceful place, sitting down with a cup of her favorite brand of tea from Uji. She poured each of us a cup, and we began.

Kudo-kun explained what we were doing there—about Amari-san's abduction and the string of other kidnappings he'd connected to it. He hoped to convince Aunt Yamadera that we had pressing needs and that whatever she remembered, no matter how painful, could help someone in the present. That winding road had led us to Nara, hoping to find out what had really happened to her nephew, why he committed suicide, what the students of the Ikeda High School Journalism Club in Chikuma knew about that, and how that explained Counselor Ishikawa's crime spree and Professor Noto's continued protectiveness of her.

Aunt Yamadera watched us steadily as Kudo-kun recounted the details of the case, and when he was finished, she composed herself with a deep breath. "It was a long time ago," she said at last, "and I couldn't tell you what any of them looked like, but I remember they came to our home in Osaka. They were worried about Ryo and didn't understand what was happening. I should've sent them home, but I was disturbed to hear that Ryo was in trouble in Nagano. I let them in while I called his wife for answers."

Yamadera-sensei's wife in Chikuma told her a little of what was going on, but the kids knew more about how it was affecting Yamadera-sensei day after day. That was why they wanted to fight back.

"They wanted to write an article!" Aunt Yamadera shook her head, still astonished with the idea. "They were so eager to defend him, but it was the wrong thing to do. An article would've only thrown fuel on the fire. I tried to talk them out of it, but they were convinced they needed to do something, that they had to come back with some proof that would clear his name."

"So you told them the truth?" I asked. "You told them what would show that Yamadera-sensei was innocent?"

Aunt Yamadera looked back at me with a pained expression. "I told them the truth—the same truth I'll tell you now, hoping that will put all this to rest."

As a child, Yamadera-sensei had been abused. He'd been subjected to gross and vile acts, but more than that, his uncle had forced him—and all the other children—to take an active part in sinister games. "Ryo never talked about it to us," Aunt Yamadera explained, "but the police did. They said that in cases like these, the children are not responsible. If they don't do what they're told, the punishment is severe: no food, no water, or worse—worse enough that death would be better."

It was for that reason, above all others, that the Journalism Club couldn't be allowed to publish an article. As friends of Yamadera-sensei, they would argue he was innocent, that he'd acted only under duress, but if his enemies ever got wind of the truth, it would only embolden them and humiliate their beloved teacher. Aunt Yamadera made Professor Noto and the rest of the club promise not to publish a word of it, nor to publish any other such article—certainly not without her permission or Yamadera-sensei's. As far as Aunt Yamadera had known, the students had kept their word. The club had promised to head straight back to Nagano and abandon their quest, and she'd hoped that would be the end of it, but her hope had been misplaced. Could there be any other reason why Yamadera-sensei would've committed suicide? It would've been all too easy for Editor-in-Chief Noto to make a promise in Osaka only to break it when she returned home. The club's confidence that Yamadera-sensei would be vindicated in time could've faltered, and the competing demands of honoring a promise versus trying to help a beloved teacher would've been difficult for any adult to handle, let alone teenagers.

If they buckled under the pressure, surely that's a forgivable sin.


	21. Overnight in Osaka

By the time we were done talking with Aunt Yamadera, it was already growing late. We still had to get back from Nara to Osaka, and then catch two trains, one from Osaka to Nagoya and another from Nagoya to Nagano. The timetable would've been very tight at best, with some risk of being stranded in Nagoya for the night, so Hattori-san offered to put us up in Osaka until we could catch a train back to Nagano in the morning.

Under the circumstances, we couldn't pass up Hattori-san's hospitality, but his idea of accommodations left something to be desired. His offices in downtown Osaka had a few extra rooms to temporarily house staff or clients overnight. Given a choice between bunk beds and futons, I chose a futon, and that would have to do.

Though we had a place to stay and rest for the night, it was still a busy evening. Hattori-san and Kudo-kun had much to think about regarding the case, and Hattori-san's wife came by to make sure we were being properly cared for. "Putting you all up is one thing, but I can't let you go without showing at least a little genuine Osaka hospitality," said his wife, Kazuha-san. She brought with her trunk-load of ingredients for a feast.

To his credit, Hattori-san was a capable partner in the kitchen. I'd say they both cooked rather than one helping the other, and while they were occupied, the four of us—the Professor, Amari-san, Kudo-kun, and I—kept an eye on the couple's young son, Manabu. Hattori-san had dreams of his son becoming a great detective someday. After all, young Manabu-chan had been named for the detective in Higashino's _Galileo_ series, but Kazuha-san hoped Manabu-chan would have a relatively normal childhood, at least for a little while. For the moment, she didn't have to worry. Manabu-chan seemed more inclined to become an artist or a chef than a world-class detective; he played with a set of rollers and clay while Amari-san sat with him. Every now and then, one of his parents would come out of the kitchen area with something for him to smell—some spices or a cup of broth, for instance—and Manabu-chan would sniff and exclaim in wonder.

"I'll be damned," Kudo-kun said at one point, looking up from his laptop while Hattori-san played with Manabu-chan. "Hattori's actually a good parent."

"It's one night," I reminded him. "I'm sure if you keep an eye on them for two or three days, you'll see Hattori-san is exactly the bumbling and inept guardian you need him to be, so you can bask in your inflated sense of superiority over him a little longer."

Kudo-kun shot me a sour look. "It's not an _inflated_ sense of superiority."

I decided to humor him, saying his sense of superiority was only slightly inflated instead, and we continued to watch Hattori-san play with his son and the clay.

"What do you think about having children?" Kudo-kun asked me.

I thought it was much too early to be talking about that, and only then did Kudo-kun realize the implications of what he'd said. He assured me he wasn't trying to move things along too quickly, but he was genuinely curious. I told him I still had a degree to finish, and if I stayed in academia I'd have some postdoctoral fellowships to work through before finding a stable position at a university. All that would take time. The bright side was that I was younger than most of my peers. Even after taking a professorship, I would still be a good age to have children. The bigger question was whether I'd be suited to them. I felt I could be rather strict with people sometimes, and while that worked with adults, it seemed like an outdated attitude to take with children.

"Don't sell yourself short," Kudo-kun insisted. He'd seen how I was with Amari-san, among others, and he felt I had a gentler side than I was giving myself credit for. "I think," he said at last, "if you're interested you'll be just fine."

I nodded at that, saying nothing more on the subject, and Kudo-kun let it go, though I sensed he might've hoped for a vote of confidence from me, but I couldn't do that. I was sure he would be a fine father, but the idea of talking about that in detail, of building up that fantasy at such an early stage in our relationship was oppressive to me. "What have you been looking at for the case?" I asked him.

He frowned, and he turned the laptop to me. He'd been digging through digital archives of the Ikeda High School newspaper and yearbooks, trying to see if evidence of Professor Noto's trip to Osaka had been recorded.

"Did you read through all the papers I gave you?" I asked.

He apologized, saying he hadn't. After three or four of them, he'd realized he would need to spend a lot of effort on understanding Professor Noto's research background, and there were more promising leads. "Why?" he asked. "Is there something I'm missing?"

No, I thought he was on the right track for the case. I was just trying to think of other evidence to look at.

We didn't talk much more before dinner, where Kazuha-san and Hattori-san served us fox udon. Fried tofu isn't my favorite food, but I do like soup. It's a warm and comfortable dish. It makes you feel like you're in the company of friends and family. It was nice to be there, despite the cramped quarters of Hattori-san's detective agency kitchen, and Kazuha-san was a good host. She sat down with Amari-san and me, asking about our work. Though she thought Amari-san's interest in detectives somewhat threatening, they had a lot in common. They both valued the pursuit of justice, albeit in different ways. Kazuha-san was a police officer; she put herself on the line for her belief in such things.

While Kazuha-san got along well with Amari-san, I also sensed that Kazuha-san had some interest in me and my relationship with Kudo-kun. It was no secret that Kazuha-san had been close friends with Kudo-kun's ex. She asked about how I'd come to be involved with Kudo-kun, as well as what I saw in him. I told her it just sort of developed over the course of this past week. It wasn't something I'd expected. As for what I saw in him, though he could be rash and insensitive, his sense of morals was incorruptible, and while his displays of affection could be awkward, you could tell they were one hundred percent genuine. Kazuha-san didn't seem satisfied with that, though, saying that it was one thing to be in Kudo-kun's orbit; it was quite another to be in a relationship with him. "You know these detectives," she said. "Are you really going to be okay with that—with him going off to work a case and not knowing when he'll be back? With murders on his mind even while you're having dinner? Heiji's wonderful, don't get me wrong—"

"Damn right I'm wonderful," said Hattori-kun, catching only the last part of the conversation.

Kazuha-san said that a truly amazing man would find time to pass the soy sauce. Hattori-san was up to the challenge, and while he was distracted, she lowered her voice, saying, "I'm just asking if you're okay with all that."

I thought her concern was a little overprotective, but she meant well. I knew what I could be getting into. I couldn't say I was totally prepared for it. In some ways, Kudo-kun and I were totally incompatible. He could bend the rules but had a rock-solid sense of morality. I could follow the law to the letter and still pursue a selfish result if I wanted. That said, we were both intelligent people with careers to think of. I could imagine worse matches on paper, and I already knew how single-minded he could be. I didn't think his casework would be a problem. He'd have to put up with me working on papers and going to conferences, too, if we got that far.

Kazuha-san understood my reasoning, and she shot a furtive look across the table, toward the boys' end. "Make sure he knows you're okay with him, really," she told me, "or he just might break your heart."

I tried to ask Kazuha-san what she meant, but just then Hattori-san started playing a video on his phone from one of those Sadako horror movies. Kazuha-san bolted from the dinner table, hysterical that the "ring" was going to be in her nightmares thanks to her mischievous husband and his gleeful accomplice in Kudo-kun. Once she calmed down, she spent the rest of the meal exposing all manner of embarrassing anecdotes from Hattori-san's childhood, including one time he concluded the culprit in an unsolved double-murder case was actually a bonobo.

After dinner, the Professor and Amari-san did half of the dishes first while Kudo-kun and I wrapped up the rest. Kazuha-san kept an eye on Manabu-chan while Hattori-san told her about the investigation and our trip to Nara. As a police officer and detective in training, Kazuha-san had a few ideas of her own about where to go with the case from there, prompting Hattori-san to get his notepad and do some brainstorming with his wife.

"Everything okay?" Kudo-kun asked me as we wiped down the last of the bowls. "You've been quiet for a while."

I was fine. It was just a little intense being around his close friends and having them inquire about our relationship when the two of us hadn't even discussed it yet. It took some getting used to, but I was flattered that he'd already told so many people around him about me. I took that as a sign I was irresistible.

He smiled to himself. "You always have a line like that. That attitude of yours makes me want to wipe that smug look off your face, you know."

"And replace it with what?" I asked.

He leaned toward me and whispered in my ear, "Something that tells me you've got nothing left to hide."

I pulled back from him. "Excuse me?"

He shot me a puzzled look, laughing awkwardly. "So I can see how crazy you are for me," he explained, "without having to suss it out of you except when you feel like showing it."

Kudo-kun's fantasies of dominating me were something we could discuss later; I wasn't quite in the mood. There were other people around, and there were too many things still unsaid between us that needed to be resolved. Kudo-kun picked up on my hesitation, and he tried to explain.

"I know things are a little unclear," he admitted, "but I was planning on having some time before my train back to Tokyo. I thought we could talk then." He gestured feebly at the kitchen sink and the dishrags. "This isn't the ambiance I had in mind."

I agreed, and I told him it was tough to think about the future when we were still trying to dig into the past. The matter of Professor Noto and Counselor Ishikawa was still weighing on me, and in hindsight, I regretted acting so impulsively as to kiss him that other night without having resolved to accept the consequences of that action. It seemed impossible that a man so devoted to reason could make me act so devoid of it, but in the end, if I had the choice between kissing him that night and not, I wouldn't even take a second to decide. I'd choose to be there, wiping down dishes with him, even if it meant wondering what I should do next.

He patted my hand. "We'll talk when this is all over," he promised. "I don't know what kind of future you want, but I'll listen, you know?"

I thanked him for that, and he offered to put the bowls away for me. Given the opportunity, he would do all the work.

Though it was growing late, Hattori-san and Kazuha-san were reluctant to leave while their son Manabu-chan was sleeping, so they stayed a little longer, hoping not to have to wake him. Kazuha-san stayed with the baby while Kudo-kun picked Hattori-san's brain over the case. There were still many questions, and Kudo-kun was mature enough to admit that two detectives would be better than one. He invited Hattori-san to join us in Nagano, but Hattori-san refused. Though he was in a dry spell of local cases, Manabu-chan was still quite young; he didn't want to be out of town for an extended period of time. Hattori-san was confident Kudo-kun would figure out the case either way. Kudo-kun understood, saying that it was only natural he couldn't compete against Manabu-chan, but he still took Hattori-san aside privately—for one last attempt at changing Hattori-san's mind, I assumed.

* * *

The following morning, we headed back for Nagano, arriving around noon. Kudo-kun passed along to Inspector Yamato a gift from Kazuha-san—something she might need in the weeks and months to come—but that was the extent of the pleasantries. We had a witness to interview. Yamadera-sensei's aunt had told us that the Ikeda High School Journalism Club, then led by young Noto Minori, traveled to Osaka during Professor Noto's second-year summer vacation, seeking information about Yamadera-sensei's past and to discredit rumors about his supposed impropriety with children. Aunt Yamadera told the club members the truth—that Yamadera-sensei had been abused as a child and that revealing the full extent of that ordeal could make matters worse for him. She did this after having consulted with Yamadera-sensei's wife.

Based on that account, the four of us headed back to the bakery in Chikuma, and Inspector Yamato and two of her detectives tagged along. The widow Yamadera took us to a back room office, not wanting to discuss these intimate details of her husband's life in the dining area. She remembered the call from her in-laws, but like Aunt Yamadera, she'd thought nothing had come of it, and she hadn't known that the students who came to investigate her husband's past were the ones from the Journalism Club. "I've known Minori-chan for years," she remarked, stunned and dismayed. "She never said a word about this."

Nor did she know Counselor Ishikawa was another member of the club and someone who'd been watched over by her husband, even though the two had met many times over the previous six months. "Likes gyoza a lot," Yamadera-san said upon seeing Counselor Ishikawa's photo. "Very quiet. Doesn't do small talk." The revelation of Counselor Ishikawa's true identity, and of our suspicions that she had committed serious crimes, left Yamadera-san bewildered. People around her were keeping secrets for no clear reason. She wanted to know why. Did Professor Noto and her club actually keep secret what they'd learned in Osaka? Or did they tell someone, and did Yamadera-sensei find out about it?

To answer those questions, we turned to another member of the Journalism Club, Hayasaka Rena. Hayasaka-san, a real estate agent, had helped Counselor Ishikawa buy the remote house used for preparing my abduction, as well as the kidnappings of Amari-san and Tsuruya-san. That association put Hayasaka-san under police scrutiny and also made her a pliable lever for information on the club, but Hayasaka-san claimed they never revealed what they knew, not to anyone, and they decided together that there was no way they could publish an article in Yamadera-sensei's defense—not using his ordeal as material, at least. That was their official decision, but Hayasaka-san remembered that while the club as a whole voted against publishing an article or asking Yamadera-sensei to fight back with the truth, Professor Noto took no position at all. "Minori-sempai was a strong leader," Hayasaka-san recalled. "It really surprised me that she abstained from the vote."

Professor Noto didn't agree with it, at least not wholeheartedly—that was Kudo-kun's conclusion. Hayasaka-san and Watanabe-san felt guilty about what had become of Yamadera-sensei. They believed they could've done more to protect him, to save him, but what if their guilt were misplaced? What if, in fact, someone among them had driven him to suicide in the first place and had kept the secret all those years? If not Professor Noto herself, then what about her close friend Counselor Ishikawa, who had also been close to Yamadera-sensei and who had gone on a spree of inexplicable crimes?

Kudo-kun and the police thought it best to interrogate both suspects at once. Inspector Yamato and one of her detectives interrogated Counselor Ishikawa while Kudo-kun, supervised by another Nagano detective, questioned Professor Noto. The inspector didn't turn up much. When she asked Counselor Ishikawa if she went back to Yamadera-sensei despite the club vote and told him about what they'd discovered, the counselor had little to say.

"He couldn't have been pleased with you," said the inspector. "How did he look at you back then? With disappointment? With disgust?"

"I don't remember anything like that," said the counselor.

Though Counselor Ishikawa gave us nothing, Kudo-kun's exchange with Professor Noto turned up new information right away. When confronted with the story of Watanabe-san's slip-up about Osaka, she admitted to the scheme. "It's true," she said. "Suo and I got the idea right before summer break. Yamadera-sensei was a good man. We all knew it. We just had to go looking for proof."

"You were so sure," Kudo-kun said, studying her. "You thought justice was on your side, hm?"

"It was," said the professor, who sat back in her chair and folded her arms. "Yamadera-sensei was innocent. You know that."

But it was the peak of adolescent arrogance for them to believe that with what little information they had, and Kudo-kun pointed out that they hadn't considered the consequences. They found the truth. It was too damaging to make known. The rest of the club knew that—all but Counselor Ishikawa, who wanted to publish an article anyway, and Professor Noto, who refused to take sides. Counselor Ishikawa must've been furious. She didn't seem the type to let something like that go. How many times had she hounded Professor Noto to change her mind? _Hold another vote,_ she might've said. The abuse of Yamadera-sensei was getting worse by the day. Other teachers were avoiding him. Students were misbehaving in his classes. "Are you telling me that after all that, both of you just sat on it? You did nothing?"

Professor Noto looked back at him with a long, cool stare. "I was not going to act," she said, "without Sensei's permission."

The police detective in the room flipped a page of his notebook and jotted something down hastily. Kudo-kun frowned, and his eyes narrowed. "What did you do?"

According to Professor Noto, one day, after consulting with Counselor Ishikawa, she went to Yamadera-sensei privately in the faculty lounge. She told him the gist of what the club had done over summer vacation and urged him to defend himself—with the truth, if need be. Yamadera-sensei seemed shaken and panicked over the prospect of his past coming to light. He dismissed the idea out of hand, and Professor Noto had thought that would be the end of it. She let the matter drop for a few days, despite Counselor Ishikawa's desire to do something, until the day of Yamadera-sensei's suicide. That day, he came to find Professor Noto in the club room, and they spoke quietly in the hallway, away from the other club members. Professor Noto confirmed more of the details of what she'd learned and reiterated her hope that Yamadera-sensei would defend himself. Yamadera-sensei asked her to meet at a cafe after school to discuss the matter in more detail. With only a couple minutes to lock up the club room and go to class, Professor Noto agreed.

But instead of meeting at the cafe, Yamadera-sensei confronted her on the bridge. He was visibly distraught, raising his voice, and attracting the attention of bystanders. Professor Noto believed he wasn't thinking clearly. She understood that what she and the others had done was a violation, but she'd done it with good intentions, and she wholeheartedly believed that he would be driven from his job and his life ruined if he allowed things to continue as they were. Yamadera-sensei responded that Professor Noto hadn't considered how revealing the truth would affect his wife's standing in the community. It was only then that Professor Noto realized he was contemplating suicide, but she couldn't do anything about it. She'd always been a small woman. She couldn't have prevented him from going over the railing, no matter how hard she tried.

Kudo-kun didn't take any notes throughout this confession. At first, I thought he trusted the recording, but there was more to it than that. Even when Professor Noto finished, he was skeptical. Her tone had been detached, distant, and level—too devoid of emotion.

"You're not sorry, are you?" said Kudo-kun.

That was a stunningly insensitive remark, one I guessed he made deliberately to provoke a reaction, but Professor Noto looked back at him with disappointment. "I didn't want him to die," she said, "but under the circumstances…we were young, we didn't know better, and we were only trying to protect him."

"It was irresponsible of you," Kudo-kun went on, moving his chair to the side of the table, adjacent to Professor Noto. "You're so level-headed, so commanding of every situation. You lost yourself trying to protect him, trying to placate your friend Ishikawa. You thought the truth had to be on your side—that it would save you—but it didn't. You were reckless. You made a grave mistake, and haven't you spent every day since then living it down?"

Professor Noto was silent, staring back at him with her lips pressed together tightly.

"Admit it," said Kudo-kun in a low, gravely voice. "He killed himself because of what you did, and you damaged everyone in your life at that time—Counselor Ishikawa, Yamadera-sensei's wife, and your other clubmates—forever."

"I didn't," said the professor.

"You did! Admit it! You ruined everything! It's your fault! Say it!"

Professor Noto looked at him quizzically. Kudo-kun stared back in silence, and as they squared off, Professor Noto's eyes flickered to the police detective.

"I think that's enough for now," said the detective, and he motioned for Kudo-kun to step outside.

I met Kudo-kun in the adjoining hallway, and I sensed he wasn't well. He was fidgety. He wiped some sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, and he seemed intent on finding a water fountain to drink something. He insisted he was fine, leading me down the hall with his phone in one hand. He wanted to consult with Hattori-san about some of Professor Noto's statements, but most of all, he was indignant over Professor Noto's attitude. "She admits wrongdoing, but she admits _fault_ only up to a point." Someone like that, he reasoned, was not actually contrite, and he would consider talking to the prosecutor about what sentence to push for, given the circumstances. "Someone who will so blindly pursue the truth is dangerous," he said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Isn't it obvious?"

No, it was not obvious. Nothing about this, about his behavior, was obvious. It was not like him to be so worked up, so emotional, in such a setting. It was not controlled. It was not reasoned. Professor Noto posed no imminent threat, and her behavior and actions, while deplorable, didn't merit such intensity from him.

"She pursued truth thinking justice would come," I said, "and so, she failed Yamadera-sensei and everyone else. 'The pursuit of truth must be its own reward,' right?"

He shot me a sidelong glance, cautious as he considered his options. "Are you so eager to figure out what makes me tick?"

_Eager_ wasn't the right word. "What's going on with you?" I asked.

"Nothing, nothing! Don't worry about it!"

"Are you that angry with Professor Noto?"

He was. In her own way, she'd played detective rashly and without considering the consequences. That should anger anyone. She played with the truth, and she didn't seem to care how she'd abused knowledge for her own ends. Anyone who would do such a thing was worthy of disdain.

Kudo-kun didn't want to dwell on that, though. He was getting hungry, and he asked if I knew any other good restaurants in town, but I wasn't in the mood to eat. I asked him once again if he'd read through the papers I'd given him, but he hadn't. With so many other promising leads, it hadn't seemed like a priority, but given how many times I'd brought it up, he thought I must've felt something was important. He was right about that.

"I think there's something you should know," I said, "about one of these papers." I pulled it up on my phone. "Why don't you read the abstract?"

He took my phone in hand and squinted. " 'A new method for inducing programmatic cell death in mammals is introduced.' " He looked up, focused and alert. "This is APTX."

"It is," I said.

"When did you start working on this again?" He scrolled through the paper. "Two years ago?"

I shook my head. "Ever since I came here, ever since Professor Noto recruited me, I've always been working on APTX."


	22. Adrift

I learned the codename _APTX-4869_ before I could ride a bicycle. That drug was my parents' lifelong quest and the reason they worked with thieves and assassins. Sometimes, the pursuit of great discovery was worth getting in bed with bad people, or so they felt. When they died, there was no one to pick up where they left off. I was young and smart—too smart for my own good. More pragmatic people would've had me killed, but my parents' benefactors were, if nothing else, willing to take risks. They took me in and gave me an education, grooming me for a singular purpose: to take over my parents' work.

To think Kudo-kun had expected I would do anything else was sad. He'd seen so much death from such a young age, yet he still seemed to hope for more from humanity—and from me.

"Why would you do that?" he demanded. "Why would you do something so dangerous? Why?"

I couldn't answer him. I'd only hoped that secrecy would protect me. It would never make sense to someone like him.

Even in his anger, Kudo-kun had the sense to be discreet. When two police officers came down the same hallway, Kudo-kun went quiet and stepped aside. I hoped he would calm down, but that was too much to ask. He was still angry. He was just quieter about it.

"You made me promise," he said, "to keep you in the loop. You made me promise when you were already up here working on that drug again. What were you thinking?"

Sometimes people demand answers but aren't prepared to hear them. He could believed what he liked. He could believe I was sorry, that I was unable to say anything against his righteous fury. What was there to say? The answers were involved, and he wouldn't be satisfied anyway. I let his fury burn me, peeling off layers of my insensitive hide. "You're right," I said. "I shouldn't have asked you for that."

Seeing that he would get no answers from me, Kudo-kun grumbled to himself and got on the phone with Furuya-san. He had almost as much to say to Furuya-san as he had with me. Kudo-kun insisted that Furuya-san send a team to Nagano; he wouldn't use the term _APTX_ over the phone, but it was obvious he was suspicious of Furuya-san's association with Professor Noto and his supposed ignorance about the professor's work. "Either you knew and you were fine with it," said Kudo-kun, "or you didn't know, and you should send a team. What'll it be?"

Furuya-san gave in, saying he would send some people as soon as he could, and Kudo-kun seemed appeased.

"I've been careful, you know," I said to him. I kept the word _apoptosis_ out of my papers. Beyond that, I'd always known there would be risk. I'm living under my own name. That in itself is dangerous, but no one thought to deny me that right. Knowing what he knew then, would he have told me to reconsider? No, even he couldn't be that cruel, but he refused to accept what I'd done, either. He would seldom accept betrayal.

"But why?" he asked again.

I couldn't answer. We both sensed the futility of continuing. Kudo-kun was in no mood to be around other people. He went to take a walk around the campus, phone clutched tightly in hand. I expected he would probably call Furuya-san back or get in touch with some his other contacts about my reckless behavior.

As for me, I didn't know what else to do but go back to the spare office the police had set aside for us. Professor Agasa and Amari-san were there, and my state of mind didn't escape them. There was no easy explanation for why Kudo-kun hadn't come back and why I was so obviously anxious and shaken. I should've been happy. I'd been dreading this day, and in many ways, it'd gone much better than I'd expected. Kudo-kun had chosen to blow off steam rather than do something more drastic. I just hadn't anticipated being involved with him when it happened.

Professor Agasa went to go track Kudo-kun down while Amari-san and I stayed back in the spare office. Amari-san was a kind soul, despite having her share of secrets. She bought me a canned coffee and didn't ask questions, only complaining about the lack of selection in the police vending machines. I thought that was too kind of her. I offered to explain, but she didn't need anything of the sort from me. I could ask her advice, but if I didn't want to, that was fine, too. "Just focus on one thing at a time," she told me. "And when I need you in the future, buy me a drink."

I appreciated her discretion; for the moment, I didn't know what to think or what to ask her. My next step depended on Kudo-kun, but at the time, I had no way of realizing how serious he was about the threat my work posed. I didn't understand that until hours later, when Furuya-san arrived with a team of investigators, intent on visiting the lab.

* * *

Furuya-san and his men had the discretion to avoid making a scene. We arrived at the lab around dusk. There would be a few hardworking students still around, but with Professor Noto in police custody, the students were caught in limbo. It wasn't clear who they should report to and what work would be pursued in the future, so compared to a typical day, the lab was rather empty, and the detectives encountered no resistance. Under the circumstances, a few police detectives snooping around was expected.

I showed the detectives to my cubicle, and they pulled up chairs from the surrounding desks to listen to my story. Professor Noto had heard about me from Furuya-san. I'd been assured she was trustworthy, but when I'd arrived in Nagano, she already knew about me and APTX. She gave me an offer I didn't think I would get from anyone else: the chance to enter Shinshu on an accelerated study program. I had more than enough experience doing research biochemistry already. I could complete a bachelor's in three years and be accepted into the graduate program on Professor Noto's recommendation. My research didn't have to concern APTX, but Professor Noto and I understood that I'd have a much better chance of moving forward if it did. APTX-4869 was a novel compound. It used mechanisms that had never before been combined in previous research. If I followed her advice, I could end up with part of the intellectual property rights to the drug once the pharmaceutical companies took it to market. That would make me comfortable, and I could do whatever I wanted with my life.

"But why would you take that risk?" asked Kudo-kun. "I understand not being happy being _Haibara Ai_, but this?"

He couldn't understand it because he'd always had his life laid out in front of him. Once he came out of hiding, he got to go back to his life. I didn't. If I had stayed as Haibara Ai, I could never have reentered biochemistry or any related field. It would've blown my cover. I would've spent years reeducating myself to do something else. Even if I'd avoided researching APTX, there still would've been that cost. I'd been out of formal education since coming back from America. Taking university entrance exams, getting a high school equivalency—all that takes time. Professor Noto offered me an elegant solution, but it was a fragile one. Conducting further research on APTX helped secure my future. Of course, if some former agent came out of hiding to track me down again, none of that would matter.

The detectives considered themselves my protectors, all trying to keep me from harming myself with my own recklessness. They weren't without conflicts, though. Kudo-kun argued with Furuya-san for the better part of a half-hour about what he'd known. Furuya-san refused to answer their questions directly, but he did say, in purely "hypothetical" terms, that I was my own woman and it was better for me to pursue this research with a known police ally in Professor Noto than in some unknown lab across the country. Kudo-kun didn't think it was very safe. He wanted copies of my research papers, of emails with coauthors, referees, conference organizers, and more. He thought in black-and-white terms. Every potential contact was a threat.

I let him snoop around, but I hoped I could do something to change his mind about all this. I offered to show the detectives the main lab area, where our specimens and equipment were kept. They needed to see inside anyway; we'd made orders to various companies for rats and diagnostic tools, and if the detectives were so suspicious, they'd need a record of everyone we'd done business with. Still, I thought I could get through to them. I realized that working on APTX posed a risk to my safety, and perhaps to the safety of everyone in the lab, but I had higher hopes for the drug than my former colleagues ever had.

I showed the detectives our mice, and I explained to them the nature of my research. The mice had been bred specifically to develop cancers of the brain. Treatments for brain cancers in humans can be damaging; brain tissue can't always be destroyed without compromising important functions. Hearing, vision, memory, speech—all of these can be affected. These are the qualities that make human beings such distinctive and unique creatures. To rob someone of them chips away at the integrity of their personality. Through my four years of working for Professor Noto, I'd found a way to use APTX to target cancer cells, particularly those in the brain, and to selectively destroy them while leaving the surrounding tissues intact. Our technique preserved as much of the healthy brain cells as possible. It would not only help save lives, it would help preserve the humanity of those saved. In that way, my dark past could be turned into something good.

"History is littered with examples of well-meaning men trying to make something good from the fruits of evil," said Kudo-kun. "What makes you think you're so much wiser than they were?"

I would've been the first to say I wasn't any wiser; I was just determined to try anyway.

Kudo-kun huffed at that, and he checked his phone. It was getting late, and Furuya-san and his men would need time to extract all the information they were after. My research wasn't going anywhere, and computer experts would have to be hauled in to search the lab's systems for signs of intrusion. For the moment, the detectives were satisfied. There was little risk of danger in waiting to resume their assessment the next morning. Furuya-san suggested reconvening the next day at nine, but Kudo-kun was non-committal, watching his phone instead of looking at Furuya-san.

There was a sharp knock on the door, and Kudo-kun moved to answer it before I'd even looked over. He let the visitor inside and chided the man. "About time you got here," said Kudo-kun.

It was Hattori-san, who scowled in indignation. "Let's see you get from Osaka to Nagano as fast as I did just now," he said. "You'd still be cooling your heels in Nagoya."

It seemed Hattori-san had been expected. He apologized to Furuya-san for missing out on the preliminary examination of the lab, and the other detectives brought Hattori-san up to speed on what I'd told them and on their findings to that point.

"So this is what gets your juices flowing," I said to Hattori-san. "A case involving abductions and suicide isn't enough, but when it comes to the Organization, you come running and leave your baby behind?"

Hattori-san shot me an annoyed look, but he remembered then he had to get in touch with his wife and assure her he'd arrived safely. As he was typing a message, he insisted that he'd come only because he'd been needed. "I've had the misfortune of running into those black coats, too! Somebody has to be in the know to make sure they're not making moves toward a comeback. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I don't wanna leave all of that in the hands of Mr. Double Agent over here." Hattori-san jerked his head toward Furuya-san. "Nothing personal."

Furuya-san was used to that sort of suspicion, but that didn't answer my question. "Why does Hattori-san need to be here?" I asked.

Kudo-kun glanced to Hattori-san and Furuya-san, but neither would speak for him. He sighed, and he explained it like this: "I'm not going to be involved in this any longer," he said. "Hattori will stay in the loop to look after you."

I was too stunned to argue with Kudo-kun before he started saying his goodbyes to Furuya-san and Hattori-san, but I followed him out the lab exit and demanded an explanation. Was this really how he was ending it between us?

He tried to spin it another way. I would be safer with an uninterested third party involved, and either way, he was going to do some traveling soon. If something urgent happened, requiring immediate assistance, he couldn't be relied on to get to me in time. It was better that someone else be aware of everything that was going on.

Thinking that was the end of it, he started walking away, but I wasn't finished. I understood his anger before, but this—this was wrong. To punish me like this was unjustifiably cruel. "If you're angry with me, say that to my face," I demanded. "If you need to get out of this situation, fine! But you can't just say someone else is going to handle it! What's really going on here?"

Kudo-kun stopped walking. He faced me, and in that moment, he looked older and more tired than I'd ever seen him. "I'm not punishing you, okay? I would never do that. I just—even if I hadn't found out about what you were doing, Hattori was going to get involved anyway."

"But why?"

"I can't explain right now. I'm sorry."

He couldn't explain, so we kept walking with the silence between us as our only companion. When we reached his rental car, Kudo-kun offered to take me back wherever I needed to go, but I asked only to be dropped off at the station. The last thing I wanted was to be trapped with Kudo Shinichi all night, imprisoned by questions neither of us wanted to answer.

* * *

When you're going through a tense time in a relationship, it's easy to start second-guessing yourself. Are your perceptions true to reality, or are they colored by the turmoil in your heart? Maybe what I was seeing from Kudo-kun that day was just a different side of him, a part of his personality I'd never known, and I'd been a fool to think I understood him before. Even as I headed back from the lab that night, I had those doubts. I talked with Amari-san on my way back, though, and she backed up my gut feeling. Kudo-kun's behavior had been suspicious. The way he'd called Hattori-san in so suddenly, and so late in the day, would be suspicious under any circumstances, no matter what I was feeling. His overreaction toward Professor Noto made no sense, especially since he'd refused to explain it. Sometimes, you just need someone else to tell you what you already know, without all that second-guessing to get in the way.

Professor Agasa and I met Amari-san for dinner at her place. Kudo-kun was off on his own, doing whatever he wanted. That was fine. I didn't want to see him just yet. At Amari-san's, the three of us hatched a plan. I left a message with Hattori-san; he would need a place to stay the night in Nagano, and if he didn't want to pay for a hotel room, he could stay with a friend of mine in Obuse. Of course, he could instead stay with Kudo-kun at the Metropolitan, but then he'd owe Kudo-kun a favor, and I doubted he'd want that. Predictably, Hattori-san took me up on my offer, and I gave him directions to the apartment in Obuse. I neglected to mention that that apartment was Amari-san's and that she, the Professor, and I would be there to ambush Hattori-san once he was on the doorstep.

"You bamboozled me!" he cried, and he vowed to head back downtown and find a hotel no matter how expensive, but Amari-san had already begun making some beef tendon stew, and it would've been a shame if Hattori-san left without trying it. On hearing that, Hattori-san stopped in his tracks. He wasn't about to let us butcher a classic recipe of Osaka. He had to stay, if only to supervise and ensure the dish was prepared according to "ancient Osaka customs". When it was all said and done, Kazuha-san did more to make sure we conformed to custom. Hattori-san knew his way around kitchen knives and other utensils, but he didn't have much of a chef's touch for flavor, so we got his wife on the phone to help us with the finer points.

Once dinner was over and Hattori-san had been fattened up, we got down to business. Why was it so urgent that he race to Nagano on Kudo-kun's request? Hattori-san tried to avoid the question with vague and misleading answers, but after some prodding, he admitted that Kudo-kun had wanted for some time to involve him more in the old case. "What leads he had on a few missing agents," Hattori-san explained, "information on assets and bank accounts, old property holdings—all of that. Kudo's leaving the country. He thought somebody should be up to speed."

But even Hattori-san thought it was more than that. There was no reason Kudo-kun would need to hand off all his remaining case files if he were going on a short vacation. Was he planning to be gone months? Even years? Hattori-san couldn't say, but Amari-san—Nagano's number one Kudo Shinichi fan—had heard that Kudo-kun's offices were up for sale, but no one could say where he'd relocate his operations to.

Throughout this case, there had been a few things about him that disturbed me. His notes, with mantras scribbled in the margins, were unnatural. When he'd arrived, I'd thought he'd come just out of curiosity or kindness, but perhaps there was something more to it than that. I felt Kudo-kun was in search of something, pursuing some great truth that had frustrated and eluded him. This case with Amari-san and me had been only a pit stop along the way, but beyond that, I had no idea what he was after. If Hattori-san didn't know, there was only one person who would: Kudo-kun's ex-girlfriend. I knew it would be a drastic step to get in touch with her, but I managed to convince Hattori-san it was worth it. Hattori-san was worried, too, and we had enough unanswered questions between the two of us that it made sense to reach out and ask, even if Kudo-kun's ex-girlfriend wouldn't give us answers.

Kudo-kun's ex, Mori Ran, was in her clinical studies at Tokyo Med and Dental. She was just getting home when Hattori-san called, and she put her plans to make dinner aside when the topic of Kudo-kun came up. She'd order out instead. This was important to her, but she also had to be mindful of Kudo-kun's privacy. She could tell us that she hadn't spoken to Kudo-kun about his upcoming trip to Europe, but she had heard he was thinking of selling the detective agency. She said he hadn't told her why he was doing it, and she wouldn't guess his reasons, either. Hattori-san may have been clueless when it came to some things, especially in matters of the heart, but he was sharp enough to realize that Mori-san had a theory. She just wouldn't share it with us, so we'd have to figure out what it was.

"Kudo's been different," said Hattori-san, "ever since the breakup. Do you have any idea if he's planning something drastic?"

"I don't know anything about his plans," said Mori-san, "but I don't think Shinichi's been different since the breakup. He was different before that."

"Before? Since when?"

Mori-san remembered it quite clearly. Kudo-kun had been working a difficult case, the so-called Bedlam Murders. Hattori-san had helped with it, but Kudo-kun had done the heavy lifting, cracking the case through understanding a series of games and puzzles the murderer had posed to the police. From Mori-san's point of view, Kudo-kun had begun seeing life differently while working that case. Hattori-san thought it might've had to do with the riddles Bedlam used. The killings were senseless and totally random; the killer had selected targets from their phone numbers. "Shinichi began to think he should approach detective work differently somehow," Mori-san explained. "I don't really understand it. I still don't."

Hattori-san thought that was enough to get a start on figuring things out, though. He'd start looking into Bedlam to see what could've affected Kudo-kun. Mori-san apologized for not being able to help more, but she had one last request: she wanted to talk to me privately for a moment. Hattori-san allowed it, and I took the phone into Amari-san's bedroom.

"I know this is weird," said Mori-san, whose expression was both pained and relieved—but maybe I was imagining that in the compression artifacts of the video call. "I wanted to congratulate you, Shiho-chan. You and Shinichi go well together."

Maybe we did go well together, but I didn't think we'd be staying together very long. As far as I knew, he could break up with me by text at any time, but Mori-san didn't see things that way. She thought Kudo-kun was being evasive to protect his ego, not out of anger with me (or at least, not exclusively).

"Shinichi is trying to improve himself," she went on, noting that she could never say that in front of Hattori-san, who would tease Kudo-kun endlessly about it. "Maybe that process of improvement will end up with him becoming a better detective. I don't know. I'm sure he has a plan, though; he just doesn't want to say what it's for."

"Is it a good thing," I asked, "if he 'improves' himself?"

Mori-san sighed. "I don't know. I didn't think he needed to improve himself at all."

I stared back at her, but Mori-san didn't back down from the implication of her words. Her gaze was steady.

"Next time you see him, tell him I said _hi_," she said, "and that I'm sorry." Beyond that, she didn't have much time to talk. Her boyfriend was coming up with dinner, and she needed to eat. Human beings require sustenance to keep going, after all.

* * *

That night, I left the others to play games and talk while I thought about what I'd learned from Mori-san, about Kudo-kun's behavior, and the mysteriousness of people. Mori-san had said she didn't understand what Kudo-kun was trying to do, yet she, of all people, had had the best opportunity to try. It disturbed me, on the one hand, to think that there could be something so fundamental to Kudo-kun's recent behavior that I didn't understand. On the other hand, I thought it wasn't so remarkable. Rarely do we truly understand the people around us. Seldom can we put their quirks and idiosyncrasies into words. They are who they are. They leave impressions on us that are ever-shifting and malleable, not as clean and precise as a photograph or a recording. The mind is utterly incapable of reproducing a faithful facsimile of another human being. To say that the ghosts of other people live inside us would be giving our brains too much credit. These are mere shadows and reflections, corrupted by our feelings, never faithful to the originals.

The best avenue for understanding another human being is to understand oneself, and if Kudo-kun really were on some quest to perfect himself, then I could understand that. I'd never wanted to be perfect, nor even thought it possible, but I knew what it meant to be pushed in the direction of progress by one's heart, whether I thought it wise or foolish. I'd questioned myself enough that I _had_ to keep that push a secret. Maybe I was projecting my own doubts onto him, but I hoped that, in my own imperfect realization of humanity, I'd learned enough that could be applied to others—applied to him—that I could reach him.

I left Kudo-kun a message late that night. I asked if we could talk. I wanted to do it in person, so when he agreed, I caught a taxi to the Metropolitan.

I met him at the bar. He had a drink in front of him, but he'd hardly touched it. He was ready to listen, but I wanted more from him than that. I was prepared to tell him why I'd come to Nagano, why I'd continued working on APTX, but I hoped he would tell me something, too.

He took a sip of his drink and slid it aside, clearing the space between the two of us. "Okay," he said, "what do you want to know?"

"Two things, actually," I said. "First, are you planning on retiring as a detective?"

He huffed to himself, and a wry smile crept across his face. "And the second?"

"Why did you break up with Mori-san?"


	23. Confessions

What irritated Kudo-kun most was that I'd guessed so much from so little. He'd told only Mori-san that he was thinking of retiring, and since Mori-san hadn't told me anything directly, he was mystified as to how I'd managed to put the pieces together.

Admittedly, I hadn't been so sure, but I'd reasoned there was no other logical explanation for the way he was passing off his involvement in Organization matters to Hattori-san. Kudo-kun trusted no one more than himself. Though he thought highly of Hattori-san, he wouldn't cut himself off that way. Put that together alongside his trip to Europe, and I realized that Kudo-kun had been considering a drastic change in his lifestyle. Of course, Mori-san's remarks sealed it. Kudo-kun would consider giving up detective work only for her, yet she didn't seem happy about what had happened. So, why? It didn't seem like anyone thought it was a good idea.

He understood that it seemed strange, but he'd put a lot of thought into his decision and tried to make sure all his responsibilities would be taken care of. He knew a few trusted private investigators in Tokyo who could take over his caseload. Hattori-san would help with Organization matters, and we still had friends in law enforcement, such as Furuya-san and the American, Jodie-sensei. Giving up detective work didn't mean divorcing himself from matters of law and justice forever. His trip to Europe was built precisely with that in mind. He'd mingle with law enforcement officers and agencies from all over the world, discussing best practices in forensics, new frontiers in crime-solving technologies, and so on. Though he had only a basic university education, he could probably worm his way into a faculty position somewhere, given his unique talents. In other words, he could teach, or maybe he could even write some crime novels like his father. I was skeptical of Kudo-kun's way with the written word, but he certainly wouldn't have had a problem devising a mystery.

Still, saying he could give up detective work and do something else with his life overlooked the _why_. "Is this something about Bedlam?" I asked.

He made a face and laughed, like that was a joke. "It is," he said, "and it isn't."

Kudo-kun had far too much pride in himself to let a run-of-the-mill serial killer cause a crisis of doubt. The Bedlam case had challenged him, and he found Bedlam's random selection of targets galling. Randomness is fair but not just. No, Bedlam was just another case—not quite like any other, but no two mysteries are. He felt that the epiphany he had during the Bedlam case was inevitable. It was mostly thanks to Mori-san.

At the time, Mori-san had just begun clinical studies. She would spend hours each day with the physical therapy unit at the university hospital, getting to know patients who were trying to walk again, who were getting used to prosthetic limbs, and so on. She once told a story about a veteran of the Self-Defense Forces who had returned from a tour of peacekeeping. The man had lost a leg to an explosive, and he was having trouble adjusting to his prosthetic. He'd suffer nightmares about the incident, and he found the phantom pains distracting. Patients like that one stuck with Mori-san. They drove home the importance of her education and chosen field of medicine. She was proud of herself for having the drive to help such people, but she also felt like she couldn't do enough.

If Mori-san had misgivings about herself or felt disturbed by some of her patients' accidents and traumas, she seldom showed it to Kudo-kun. She'd come home to his estate in Beika, and to all outward appearances, everything was fine with her. They'd have dinner, read books together, watch movies, clean the house, and so on. They were a happy couple. They only time they spent apart was when he was working on a case or she had to study—though he would quiz her on material if she needed the help.

As much as Mori-san had seen at the hospital, her patients never kept her awake at night.

Kudo-kun couldn't make his mind behave that way. People were counting on him. Bedlam was killing people every week. As much as he knew he needed rest, to put a case completely out of his head was impossible. With every waking moment, he was thinking about Bedlam's puzzles or the scant evidence at the crime scenes. It might not have been the dominant part of his thought processes, but the case was always with him—even when he was having breakfast with Mori-san, even when he called her over lunch. It was to be expected, after all. He'd been interested in mysteries all his life. He'd practically grown up with them. There would always be a small piece of his mind working on some case.

"People would sometimes say to me I should learn karate from Ran," he said at one point, while we were sitting at the bar. "I never wanted to do that, though. That was her passion, and I wouldn't want to intrude on it, but I would give anything to learn how she just moves all the hospital stuff out of her mind. When Ran was with me, she was 100% with me." He looked into the glass of shochu highball and swirled the drink around. "I'm not sure I was ever 100% with Ran."

But that wasn't for lack of trying. He tried all sorts of things. No more reading mystery novels at home. No work calls or emails after 9. No new cases on weekends. He set himself a hundred rules and drove himself, and Mori-san, crazy as he tried to hold to them. Catching himself thinking about cases in _forbidden time_ stressed him out, and Mori-san didn't understand why he was being so hard on himself. She loved him the way he was, warts and all.

"She was too kind," Kudo-kun insisted to me. "She was always too kind."

She was kind, but she could still argue fiercely with him. He wasn't listening to her. Why would he? He was convinced she was being too accommodating, and if they continued, it would only cause her pain in the long run. He needed to be 100% there for her. He needed to be more than just a great detective who happened to be a passable boyfriend every now and then. In his mind, he made the only logical choice: he ended it, believing he would improve himself and get back together then.

He'd taken her for granted in more ways than one. He'd underestimated how much their breakup would hurt her, and he'd never considered that she might fall in love with someone else, but she did. For such a smart man, he'd been remarkably stupid. He understood that in hindsight, but what else could he do? Even if Mori-san hadn't found someone else, he still wasn't satisfied. If he defined himself mainly through the cases he solved, he might help a lot of people, but he wouldn't have much for himself. There had to a better balance, but he hadn't found it yet.

Of course, I could tell him he was fine—at least as far as balancing his life with his detective work—until I was blue in the face. No amount of hearing it would make him feel that in his heart. He wasn't delusional about it. He thought Mori-san and I were probably right. It was as if he could walk out into moonlit night and look up, only to see the moon reflecting a vivid shade of green. All the logic in the world could tell him it was a pale gray, but that wouldn't fix the perceptions of his mind.

Though I understood what he'd been going through, I still thought he'd reacted too harshly toward me. Yes, my research had posed a danger, and if he'd been so angry just because of the promise I'd insisted on, that was one thing, but I sensed there was more to it than that. Kudo-kun grew annoyed that I was pressing the issue, but he didn't try to weasel out of it.

"Maybe it's unfair," he admitted, "but I expected better from you. I thought you had a good thing here. I thought, if anyone can show how to reinvent themselves, it was you."

I needed someone to slap me awake from this impossibly twisted dream. Somehow, I'd become Kudo Shinichi's role model! The universe was sure to implode on itself at any moment and start creation anew.

Kudo-kun wouldn't have put it like that, but he was man enough to admit he'd been searching for answers, and he wouldn't let pride get in the way. Before knowing what my research had been, he'd thought my move to Nagano, reclaiming my name and identity in the process, had taken great strength. To think that I'd taken a great shortcut instead, keeping it secret from everyone, affected him more than he would ever have expected. He'd still call Furuya-san up in a heartbeat if he had it to do over again, but he would've done things differently at the police station and the lab. "I know you must've had your reasons. I just don't understand them. I still don't, but that's no excuse to snap. I'm sorry."

I was sorry, too. Though it's debatable who'd behaved worse, it wasn't the time to argue over relative levels of guilt.

I ordered a drink for myself and took my turn at telling a story.

* * *

When the Organization fell, the path forward seemed clear. I'd established a new, safe identity for myself already. Going back to who I was didn't make sense. Miyano Shiho had no living friends and only distant relatives who'd never known her before. Haibara Ai had an eventful and warm life, surrounded by friends and taken in by a kind old man who, despite his lack of discipline when it came to food, was everything I could've asked for in a parent. Haibara Ai's life wasn't boring, but it was untarnished and free.

From the beginning I didn't feel like I deserved such a life, but I wanted it, and I had no desire to go back to who I was, either. That made my initial choice easy, but staying that way was harder than I'd expected. On the anniversary of my sister's death, I visited the graveyard where she was buried. I couldn't go any closer than the street; former Organization agents could have been watching, but I still paid my respects. She would've been happy I was doing well and that I was safer than I had been in years, but it was also so unfair. I was safe and alive, and she wasn't. Like Kudo-kun, just knowing I felt some survivor's guilt didn't mean I could just will myself not to feel it.

Though Haibara Ai had a safe and interesting social life, she still had to go to school every day, taking lessons I'd long since mastered. It had been one thing to endure those school days while under constant threat. Back then, I'd focused on doing my best imitation of an ordinary schoolgirl (well, a rather cool and aloof one), on not drawing attention, and on keeping out of trouble. Once the threat had gone, I found keeping up that façade day after day tiring. Even my friends realized something was wrong. I knew that my disguise was becoming more and more untenable.

I hadn't imagined I could reclaim my old life easily, but there was someone who was already doing something like that. He'd been in hiding, too, while the Organization was hunting him. Their demise meant he could come out of the shadows; return to his girlfriend, who'd been waiting for him; resume his studies; and put himself on track to be a world-famous detective once again. Kudo-kun was the one making it look easy, and after six months of staying as Haibara Ai had worn me down, I thought it really could be that easy for me, too. The difference was that he had great friends and a support system to put him back into place. I didn't have much like that. I didn't know how I would get there. I didn't know if I even deserved it.

It was by chance, or perhaps in search for inspiration, that I listened to my mother's secret tapes and found an answer. My parents had spent so much of their lives trying to perfect APTX. They'd sacrificed safety and happiness for that pursuit. I already felt uncomfortable with Haibara Ai's happy and innocent life. Being Miyano Shiho again was going to be dangerous anyway. Incorporating APTX into the plan seemed fitting. I would sacrifice myself as they did, as my sister had. Hopefully, the result would be something more beneficial to mankind this time, instead of a selfish quest for knowledge. I though it all fit together that way. With this plan, I wouldn't have to feel guilty for being alive.

* * *

"You _would_ refuse to be happy just because you're stubborn," said Kudo-kun, sizing me up from the bar stool next to me. After a while, he laughed. "We're real pieces of work, aren't we?"

We absolutely were.

"But if that's all it is, why keep it such a big secret?"

I looked through the glass of my shochu highball—I'd ordered one too, and like Kudo-kun, I didn't care for it, either—and said, "Do you really think you're in love with me? Or did you just think I was doing well for myself here, and you wanted to learn something from me?"

He frowned, and he took some time to think about that question—a reaction no woman wants to see—but his answer was thoughtful. "I used to think you were such a pain in the ass. Then I understood that you were a pain in the ass because you'd been through hell. I want to protect you from that, but that's not all. I want to talk about books and science and politics and whatever with you because I know you will never say something careless, and ever since this morning, even with everything that's happened, I still find myself wondering what kind of shampoo Hattori's wife gave you." He couldn't look me in the eye by the end of that. "Is that enough?" he asked.

"It's not a question of _enough_," I told him. "Some of this is still new to you. That's not how it is for me."

The detective could be surprisingly slow with some things, but even he couldn't misinterpret that statement. "No…"

But it was. Did he really think so little of himself that it was unfathomable? Day after day, month after month—we were in hiding. We had only each other most days. Our friends in law enforcement could help us only every once in a while. At first, I thought he was just this excitable young man with a mystery fetish. He was fun to toy with. I didn't realize until later that his talk of justice wasn't empty. He really meant it, and it hurt him when he wasn't able to see it done.

We'd taken down the Organization together, but then we had no reason to rely on each other anymore. He went back to his real life while I stayed in my fantasy. We were supposed to be strangers. We weren't supposed to know each other. Life is full of moments where people change paths and leave old friends and colleagues behind. The only other person in my life I could be truthful with was Professor Agasa. It was a lot for an old man to shoulder. I needed Kudo-kun in my life, but at the same time I didn't want to be too close to him, and I still can't say whether I went to Nagano to stand as an equal to him or to be away from him. It doesn't take a forgetfulness drug to make one's memory faulty.

Kudo-kun was shocked and confused, but I assured him it would be all right. I'd made a good friend in Amari-san, and the issue with Professor Noto was totally unrelated to anything he and I had done.

By the time we were done talking, the bar was about to close for the night, and Kudo-kun called a taxi to take me back to Amari-san's, at my request. There was still too much between us, too many issues to hash out that we'd only begun to discuss. The difference between his feelings and mine would still be there, and the foolish things we'd done couldn't be taken back, but we could at least try to live with them.

As for the two of us, Kudo-kun wondered if I were disappointed. Getting involved with him had turned out much more complicated than it must've seemed at first blush, and he was still searching for something. Perhaps he wasn't suited to a relationship just then. Giving in to temptation had been a disservice to me, or so he thought, but he wasn't giving me enough credit. I'd known from the beginning he would be difficult to stay with, at least in some ways. If he still needed time to find himself, then that was the right choice for him, and he should take care of his well-being first.

He thanked me for my understanding, and he offered to let me stay the night at the Metropolitan, but I refused. I thought it would be better to go back to Amari-san's. As much ground as we'd covered that night, there were still things that needed to be worked out between us. He was disappointed, but in the end, he thought I was right.

I've never been sure if my feelings for Kudo Shinichi were born of love or simple dependency. Perhaps the root cause doesn't matter, so long as those emotions transform into something healthy and worthwhile, but seeing Kudo-kun so lost was sobering. I'd only ever felt great confidence from him, even when he was frustrated in his investigations or desperate to save someone. The case of Kudo Shinichi himself was not one that could be cracked through reason and determination. There was no clear path forward. There was nowhere to begin. And if that man had become lost, what hope was there for someone like me? I'd deceived my closest friends. I'd betrayed the trust of those who'd put their faith in me.

I didn't have an answer to that, and I thought it would take more than one night of talking (or drinking) to figure it out, but as Kudo-kun walked me to the taxi, he touched my shoulder gently and said,

"I _will_ solve this case for you. That's a promise."

Really, he just had to act cool when I was too worn out to resist him. I got back out of the taxi and laid a slow kiss on his cheek. Sometimes, you just need to be connected to someone—to share in their triumphs or to be lost together.


	24. Fragile Truth

Eleven days after I'd found Amari-san's apartment broken into, there was a gathering of great detectives in Nagano, set on solving the case once and for all. Kudo Shinichi, Hattori Heiji, and officers of the prefectural police convened in a conference room with cork bulletin boards full of photos and diagrams, connecting the pieces of physical evidence with documents and reports from twenty years before. A projector pointed at one end of the room paged through slideshows the police had put together, outlining theories of the crime with bulletpoints and digital images, but the main focus was on a set of floor plans for Ikeda High School. These blueprints served as scale representations of the school, supplemented by maps of the surrounding area. The detectives' theory was simple: Yamadera Ryo, a teacher at Ikeda, threw himself in the Chikuma River because he learned that his traumatic past had leaked to the Journalism Club. It seemed likely that Ishikawa Suo had told him so, imploring him to defend himself against a campaign of ostracism that had been grounded in half-truths and rumors. If so, Counselor Ishikawa's mistake led to Yamadera-sensei's suicide, which Professor Noto witnessed and likely covered up to prevent the real reasons from leaking out, protecting herself and her friend Ishikawa, but Counselor Ishikawa's guilt over her involvement in this matter would lead to her breaking from reality. She would later abduct three women, including Amari-san and myself, targeting people who had been through traumatic events like her own to see if we would give in to temptation, consuming Professor Noto's drug _Leze_ to wipe our memories of those awful events.

The detectives' goal was to investigate and disprove Professor Noto's story. Professor Noto had claimed she'd confronted Yamadera-sensei about his childhood and kept that secret from the rest of her club members, including Counselor Ishikawa. She'd given us a story that wrapped everything up in a neat little bow—except for why Counselor Ishikawa had abducted three women. While it was possible the two matters were unrelated, none of the detectives believed that, and Professor Noto had admitted to lying to the police before.

Though they couldn't verify whether Professor Noto had met Yamadera-sensei earlier that week, Professor Noto had claimed she'd spoken to him during lunch the day he died. Those circumstances had been recorded during the initial investigation. All five club members had been in the club room; none of them had reported seeing Yamadera-sensei, but teachers in the faculty office had observed him leaving early at lunch.

The lunchtime meeting was the key. If we could prove it didn't happen, Professor Noto's story would fall to pieces.

* * *

To gather evidence for our theory, the police called in the three remaining members of the Ikeda Journalism Club: Hayasaka Rena, Otsuka Tetsuo, and Watanabe Satoru.

Hayasaka-san went first. She was the most cautious of the bunch; she brought an attorney with her. Having helped Counselor Ishikawa find an isolated home to plot the abductions, Hayasaka-san was concerned she could be arrested, even though her lawyer maintained she had no knowledge of Ishikawa's plans. Because of this, Hayasaka-san didn't want to cooperate. We'd have to formally hold her to get information, and even then she could resist interrogation, but she'd already settled her affairs at home and was prepared to stay in jail.

Kudo-kun had no patience for such a waste of time. He pressured Inspector Yamato and her bosses to narrow the scope of the questioning to only those matters concerning Yamadera-sensei's death, which were beyond the statute of limitations. Though Hayasaka-san's lawyer still had reservations, Kudo-kun argued that Hayasaka-san was in a unique position to help them determine if there were any connection between the events back then and Counselor Ishikawa's crimes and why Professor Noto had lied to the police about Yamadera-sensei's death. "His wife is still in Chikuma," Kudo-kun noted. "She still runs that bakery. She might think that it was just a tragedy. She doesn't know why. The police and I just want to understand what really happened, so we can tell her, and she won't keep on living in the shadow of a lie."

Hayasaka-san looked pained, and she took some time to confer with her lawyer about what they could say. The lawyer clearly didn't like what she wanted, but after some deliberations, he laid out their terms. "If there's even a hint that Hayasaka-san is being investigated, we stop talking. Understand?"

The police agreed, and we began with what Hayasaka-san knew about Yamadera-sensei's death. She admitted that Professor Noto had told the rest of the club a different story, saying that Yamadera-sensei had somehow learned of their trip to Osaka and that they all knew about his childhood. Professor Noto hadn't told them how Yamadera-sensei found out, but at the time, Hayasaka-san and the others assumed Professor Noto had done it herself, and Professor Noto had acted as though that were true. She'd defended Yamadera-sensei knowing and asking him to come out against the rumors. If nothing changed, he would almost certainly have been forced out of the school anyway. The only mistake had been underestimating how anxious he was to keep it secret. Despite that ghastly implication, Hayasaka-san and the others had kept quiet, persuaded that speaking out would only bring undue attention on the rest of the club. They'd gone to Osaka hoping to help. To be implicated in Yamadera-sensei's suicide would've been too much to bear.

When asked to remember if Professor Noto could've snuck out at lunchtime the day Yamadera-sensei died, Hayasaka-san couldn't say much specifically about that day, but we read her previous statements back to her, and in light of Professor Noto's new story, Hayasaka-san wasn't convinced. Professor Noto had always made a show of ensuring that custody of the room key was clear. She wouldn't have left the room without handing it off to Watanabe-san—the vice president—and announcing it loudly.

The second witness was Otsuka Tetsuo, the final member of the Journalism Club. An investment banker, Otsuka-san judged people quickly. His cousin, Hayasaka-san, was a stereotypical "good girl"—good grades but not too good, popular and athletic, and so on. He cynically felt that she'd crafted that image to fit in, but despite that, they had a good relationship. Otsuka-san found Watanabe-san, the vice president, to be gruff and standoffish. He had similar feelings about Counselor Ishikawa. As for Professor Noto, she was often contradictory. She ruled the club with a light touch, allowing great freedom. She let people argue with her about the direction of the paper and what articles should've been produced, but when she made a final decision, it was _final_, and no further arguments would be allowed. The contrasting personalities of Counselor Ishikawa and Professor Noto puzzled him. They didn't seem like natural friends, but by the time the five of them went to Osaka, the two were obviously close.

Like Hayasaka-san, Otsuka-san had felt pressured not to reveal Professor Noto's lies. The trip to Osaka and Yamadera-sensei's subsequent discovery of it had been an obvious mistake, but they hadn't purposefully done anything wrong. He thought it arrogant of Professor Noto to go against the vote unilaterally. They'd agreed not to speak a word of it, yet Professor Noto did it anyway? And unlike the others, he wasn't fully behind this effort to protect Yamadera-sensei. He had no ill feelings toward their advisor, but whatever he was going through didn't have to be their concern. He'd gone along on the Osaka trip anyway because he'd always wanted to go there and because he felt like he'd be excluded in the future if he didn't. That was all.

As for whether Professor Noto could've snuck out to meet Yamadera-sensei during lunch the day he died, Otsuka-san didn't think that was possible. Like Hayasaka-san, he believed that Professor Noto would've handed off the key. Neither Otsuka-san's statements nor anyone else's indicated that anyone left the club room during lunch, but he couldn't rule out that someone else went to the toilet or otherwise stepped out briefly. It was also possible that Yamadera-sensei could've met Professor Noto—or someone else—while they were on the way back to their classrooms.

The last witness was Watanabe-san. We had more leverage with Watanabe-san, given that he'd been evasive about the trip to Osaka before. Watanabe-san seemed to understand that.

Like us, Watanabe-san thought Counselor Ishikawa had more to do with Yamadera-sensei's death than Professor Noto had admitted. In his memory, Counselor Ishikawa was the one who must've pushed for the Osaka trip. He doubted Professor Noto would've supported such a misguided idea on her own, even though Hayasaka-san came around to it. He also thought Professor Noto abstained from their vote only in deference to Counselor Ishikawa, who had wanted to forge ahead with their article despite the obvious risks and potential for embarrassment. Either Professor Noto told him at Counselor Ishikawa's behest, or Counselor Ishikawa did it herself. "Ishikawa was always reckless and hardheaded," Watanabe-san remarked. "Maybe she grew up, but back then, she'd argue with anyone and get into fights at the drop of a hat."

Sure enough, the reports from the time showed that Counselor Ishikawa had gotten into some sort of scuffle the previous day; she'd come to school with visible cuts and scrapes on her arms, and she'd been in poor condition the whole day, seeming uncomfortable from the start of the first class. Otsuka-san and Watanabe-san had suspected she'd been suffering after-effects of a fight, but Hayasaka-san believed there was a more mundane reason: menstrual cramps. The reports at the time made no mention of whether Counselor Ishikawa excused herself during lunch, but she certainly would've had reason to.

While there was a plausible explanation that Counselor Ishikawa's role in the whole affair was larger than Professor Noto would admit, we still lacked hard proof. The detectives searched for other gaps in Professor Noto's story, including how she ultimately met with Yamadera-sensei. The club had met again after school, and Professor Noto claimed she'd been last to leave with the room key. Supposedly Yamadera-sensei had left already, trying not to draw attention to the two of them. The members of the club had been in and out of the room based on their assignments. Hayasaka-san was writing an article about the student council. Otsuka-san was their point of contact for printing issues; he and Professor Noto spoke for a while about issues with their printer, and he left early to try to talk with the shop owner before they closed for the day. Watanabe-san was writing about new construction for the school, and Counselor Ishikawa had been assigned to write an article about the school soccer team, but she said she only watched their practice from a distance, producing notes on the team roster and their records in previous years, and none of the police records indicated that the detectives interviewed witnesses to verify Counselor Ishikawa's whereabouts.

* * *

We adjourned for the day only marginally closer to proving our theory, and in light of our lack of progress, the police were growing impatient. Inspector Yamato was feeling pressure from her superiors to determine how much manpower should be dedicated to the case. As far as they were concerned, Counselor Ishikawa's motives were irrelevant. If she wanted to explain her actions to a judge, she could do that, and the police could investigate her claims at that time. Inspector Yamato's people had dozens of open robberies and break-ins to solve. A case with the perpetrator already in a jail cell wasn't the best use of time. She told Kudo-kun her people would still answer questions and offer resources, but if there were no breaks in the case soon, her department would have to stop investigating on their own.

Kudo-kun understood the police had limits, but he wasn't satisfied with giving up on the case. We headed to Chikuma to do some more leg work, stopped for some fine Italian, and continued on foot to the Route 403 bridge. Kudo-kun wouldn't quit this case without walking Yamadera-sensei's path one last time.

We started from the east bank of the river, but already Kudo-kun and Hattori-san spotted some differences from twenty years before. The baseball park to the south had expanded with an additional field, and a swimming pool had been built on the opposite side of the river. If they meant to reenact Yamadera-sensei's last moments, already the little details of the scene were out of place.

When we reached the spot where Yamadera-sensei had jumped, Kudo-kun took note of the time and the light levels. It was a little brighter than it had been that night, but he was still curious about how far away we could be seen or heard. Amari-san and the Professor headed further down the bridge while Hattori-san went back the way we came. Kudo-kun put Amari-san's bright yellow coat around my shoulders to make me more visible, and while the others were pacing off distances, Kudo-kun had the opportunity to talk.

"They were right here," he said, tapping a foot on the sidewalk. "They were right here. She was arguing and pleading with him, but nobody stopped them." He looked back the way we came; Hattori-san was already giving a thumbs up, so Kudo-kun cupped his hands and said, "Tigers suck!" Hattori-san shook his head, and Kudo-kun thought that fitting. "We can't even hear each other over traffic at thirty meters, and that's nothing compared to twenty years of time."

Being a detective is sometimes an exercise in futility. The universe is constantly thwarting our best efforts to discover truths both past and present. As a scientist, I knew that well. That being said, no one should confuse occasional futility with total impossibility.

"Perhaps this just isn't your case," I told him. "Don't let it get to you. You've solved hundreds murders and protected countless lives. You don't think you should solve every mystery, do you?"

He knew better than that, of course, but he didn't like it.

For the moment, we were alone. Hattori-san was inspecting a streetlamp, and Amari-san and the Professor had yet to turn back around. Kudo-kun and I stood at the bridge railing while traffic zipped by. The bridge wasn't very high, but it was still breeze and unstable, standing so close to the edge. Kudo-kun held on to the railing, overlooking the southern bend of the river and the lights of town beyond. In the moonlight, the river was a dark, shimmering void.

"You know," said Kudo-kun, "Sensei made a big mistake jumping off here."

I peered over the railing, and I couldn't help but agree. Though it was hard to see, the reflection of the moon showed the water levels were low, and the riverbank sloped gently to the water. Yamadera-sensei's suicide couldn't have been easy. His body probably struck the riverbed.

"If he was looking for a painless way to go," Kudo-kun went on, "there are lots of other ways, but he was driven to do it then. He didn't save himself as much misery as he could've."

"People make those mistakes all the time," I pointed out. "How many killers have you arrested who blamed their murder sprees on compulsions? Maybe it's an excuse or deceit, but some of them probably did feel forced to take lives and were unable to resist the call. That's just how human beings are sometimes. Even if we can identify such drives, that doesn't mean we have the power to defeat them. In some cases, the best anyone can do is identify that those impulses exist."

"You think that's enough?" he asked, skeptical.

I thought it was realistic; I never said I would be satisfied with it.

Kudo-kun laughed bitterly, but he did seem cheered up by our conversation. He let go of the railing and cast a critical eye on the railing and toward Hattori-san. He jerked his head toward Hattori-san, asking me to follow, and we met Hattori-san under the streetlamp that he found so interesting. Hattori-san seemed fascinated with the changes made in the previous twenty years to the lamps and their bulbs.

The night after Yamadera-sensei died, one passing driver had said he'd seen a man and a girl by the railing. "The man was talking with a girl in an Ikeda vest," he'd said. "I couldn't hear what she was saying, though. I was about four or five cars away, and the traffic didn't stop again even as I passed by."

Hattori-san didn't think it was possible to see the girl's clothes from four or five car lengths away, at least not with the modern streetlamps. Kudo-kun felt that the driver could've only made out the girl's uniform when he passed closer, but that was a minor and inconsequential inconsistency with his story. I thought there was something more interesting about it, though. As the wind nearly blew Amari-san's coat off my shoulders, I remarked,

"I pity the girl who walks this bridge in only a vest in October."

Kudo-kun's eyes lit up, and a grin crept over his face. He may have thought his passion for mysteries destructive, something to be kept in check, but that passion was like the wood of a matchstick waiting to be struck. Once the spark of truth caught up to it, there was no doubting what had happened. A single flame can beat back the shadows, revealing what hides beyond the veil of ignorance. Kudo-kun's confident smirk? That's more radiant than a thousand suns.


	25. Event Horizon

The five of us headed back to the Metropolitan, and the detectives worked on their theory. They didn't sleep much; their idea was just coming together, and they wouldn't rest until it was complete. I napped a little, but only when I felt the fatigue too much to bear. Kudo-kun and Hattori-san were like dogs on a scent. They went to bed around four in the morning. They realized they had enough to present to the police, and they would need to be as well-rested as possible to extract the last crucial bits of information from Professor Noto and Counselor Ishikawa.

Back at police headquarters, it took most of the morning and early afternoon to assemble Kudo-kun's theory into a coherent presentation, and by that point, his enthusiasm had dulled to quiet certainty. As innovative and unique a discovery can seem, much of the joy of it is wrung out by turning it into a slideshow with graphs, charts, references, tables, and figures. It doesn't start to feel exciting again until the full theory is laid out elegantly before you for all the world to see.

That being said, Kudo-kun was a natural for making his case without rehearsal or even much time to prepare. Inspector Yamato and her detectives gathered, along with a few supervisors and their subordinates from other departments, to hear Kudo Shinichi make his case. It was, in many ways, not unlike a scientist's thesis defense, with Kudo-kun fielding questions from the observers and explaining his interpretation of the evidence where needed. One slide at a time, Kudo-kun put together a narrative of why Yamadera-sensei committed suicide, the effect his death had on Professor Noto and Counselor Ishikawa, and why Counselor Ishikawa had taken her victims. In the end, the detectives in attendance were satisfied, but there were still several aspects of his theory that were unproven. We would have to go to Professor Noto and Counselor Ishikawa to see if we could track down the last few pieces of the puzzle.

* * *

Having been held for almost a week, Professor Noto wasn't too happy to be visited. Perhaps she would've been relieved if she'd known that the end was so near. Though only Inspector Yamato and Kudo-kun were in the room with her, the observation room behind the glass was full of spectators. One of them was a moustached inspector from homicide who instructed his junior detectives to pay attention to every single word. "When Kudo Shinichi delivers a grand deduction," he said, "there is not a statement or question that is out of place."

Kudo-kun took a backseat to Inspector Yamato in the beginning of the interrogation. He sat to the side while the inspector sat across from Professor Noto. Business-like and neutral in tone, the inspector went through a few documents, starting with the professor's revised statement about Yamadera-sensei's death. Again, Professor Noto insisted on sticking to her new story: "Sensei took me aside during lunch and told me he wanted to talk about what we learned in Osaka," she explained again. "He told me to meet him at a café across the river. I ran into him on the bridge instead. We started talking. He was angry and upset; I'd never seen him that way. I didn't realize he was thinking of committing suicide until it was too late."

Kudo-kun put his pen down. "Except you weren't there."

"Excuse me?" said the professor.

"Tell us what you and Yamadera-sensei talked about," he asked.

"That was twenty years ago. You really expect me to remember the entire conversation?"

"Tell us about the moments before he jumped then," said Kudo-kun. "Surely you remember that, don't you? That's the sort of thing no one would ever forget."

Professor Noto stared at him and took a few moments before continuing. Annoyed, she stared at Kudo-kun for the entirety of her statement. "I tried to tell him it would be okay to defend himself and that the club would support him, but Sensei finally said _enough_. He wouldn't be doing that. He couldn't risk the damage to his wife's business and reputation, and the more people talked about him, the more likely it was someone would find out about his childhood. He just couldn't gamble with his wife's future like that. He told me to go, but I wouldn't, and that's when I realized he was going to kill himself. He climbed over the guardrail with his right foot first. I tried to pull him back, but he slapped my arm away and shoved me down. I started shouting and looking for help, but by the time I looked back, he was gone. I couldn't even hear the sound of him hitting the water over the traffic. He was gone."

Inspector Yamato produced another sheet of paper and marked down a few phrases in red ink. "Very good," she said. "That's almost exactly what you said twenty years ago."

"That's because it happened just like I said," the professor argued.

"It's too much like what you said," argued Kudo-kun. "If we search your house, are we going to find a copy? Or did you write it down yourself so you wouldn't forget?"

"I was there," the professor insisted, leaning over the table. "Believe it or not. That's your choice."

Kudo-kun shook his head. "I don't believe in things. I find some ideas credible—consistent with evidence—and some not. You're not credible, Professor. You weren't there. You didn't speak with Yamadera-sensei that day. All of your clubmates say that you wouldn't have left without handing the key off to Watanabe-san, and they don't remember that, and they never said you did such a thing that day."

"They lied for me back then, and they don't remember it or don't want to remember it," said the professor.

"But they do remember that Counselor Ishikawa was ill with period cramps," said Kudo-kun. "She could've easily gone to the toilet. No one would've thought it notable."

Professor Noto folded her arms, challenging the detectives to make a point.

Unexpectedly, the inspector switched topics, producing a profile of Professor Noto in high school. It had appeared in the school newspaper. In her first year, Professor Noto had been profiled by the paper, along with other first-years such as Watanabe-san, to introduce new writers to the readership. "Do you remember this?" the inspector asked.

Professor Noto said she couldn't; it'd been quite a long time ago, but on reading it again, she thought she'd been a little too idealistic. Perhaps it was a cynical ploy to appeal the upperclassmen, who had wanted good publicity. She couldn't say for sure.

"There's nothing else unusual about this profile?" asked the inspector. "I'd say the photo isn't too flattering."

"I've never been easy to photograph," said the professor.

"This article was published in May of your first year," the inspector went on. "Early May, so it's likely the photo was taken just at the beginning of the month or in late April. It had been unseasonably warm for weeks, but you're still wearing your uniform jacket here. Do you get cold easily?"

As a matter of fact, Professor Noto was wearing a sweater in the interrogation room. "I wouldn't say _easily_," she said, "but I'm not particularly warm-blooded, either. I don't think I was then." Still, she looked at the inspector skeptically. "What's this about?"

Kudo-kun pulled out a sheet of paper. "This is a statement from a driver who passed by a man and a girl from Ikeda the night Yamadera-sensei died." He turned the statement toward Professor Noto and began reciting the relevant line. " 'I couldn't hear what she was saying—I was about four or five cars away—and they were a meter or two from the nearest light. All I could tell was that she was an Ikeda girl.' The detective asks how the driver knows this, and he says, 'By the vest she was wearing.' " He looked up and slid the sheet aside. "Not by her uniform but by her _vest_, a vest that is only seen when you're in summer uniforms or not wearing your regular jacket."

"This isn't proof of anything," said the professor, looking away.

"But it is," said the inspector, who laid out the remaining pieces of evidence. She put out another photo. "This is the Journalism Club. Guess who isn't wearing her jacket when everyone else is?" She produced another witness transcript. "This is a copy Watanabe-san's remarks from the day after Yamadera-sensei died. He remarks that Counselor Ishikawa had scratches and scrapes on her arms—injuries that wouldn't have been visible unless she wasn't wearing her uniform jacket." She took out a third sheet of paper. "This is from the weather service. It was unseasonably cool that day, with a high of only 9 degrees. You yourself said you're cold-blooded." The inspector laid the rest of the folder in front of Professor Noto. "You were cold-blooded enough to lie for twenty years, weren't you?"

Professor Noto sat there, staring back at them in stunned silence, and with no answers forthcoming, the inspector grew impatient.

"If you won't tell us what happened, we can ask Counselor Ishikawa directly then," said the inspector, beginning to gather all the proof back in the folder.

"Wait." The professor balled her hand into a fist. "You don't have to do that."

The inspector and Kudo-kun exchanged glances, and Kudo-kun took a turn at being a receptive ear. "Why don't you tell us what really happened, then?" he said.

* * *

When the Ikeda Journalism Club returned from Osaka, they met on the first day of the new term and held a vote. What they'd learned about Yamadera-sensei was explosive. There would be great risks in revealing it, even in his defense, and the majority of the club felt they had gone too far. They voted not to mention what they'd learned even to Yamadera-sensei; they would work to clear his reputation in other ways. Hayasaka-san, Watanabe-san, and Otsuka-san voted this way. Professor Noto abstained. Counselor Ishikawa wanted to tell him what they'd found. She was overruled.

Professor Noto suspected that Counselor Ishikawa would buckle under pressure. Despite her rough exterior; her appearance as a tall, strong woman; and her family's affiliation with the Kuonji clan; Counselor Ishikawa had grown fond of Yamadera-sensei, who had stuck his neck out to find her a place in the club and to shield her from abuse. The effort to discredit him had started in part due to his interest in her. She wouldn't let that stand any longer. It was just a matter of time, then, before Counselor Ishikawa ignored the vote. "I was surprised," Professor Noto told us, "that it took her until late September to do it."

When it happened, Yamadera-sensei went to Professor Noto afterward, seeking promises that the club would not publish what they'd learned without his consent. He'd seemed agitated about it, but Professor Noto had thought that reasonable, and she'd made a point to tell Counselor Ishikawa that continuing to press the matter that way had been foolish. Of course, Counselor Ishikawa had little patience for quiet maneuvers. She wasn't about to go against Yamadera-sensei's wishes, but she was anxious. The club needed to do something soon, but they would never get the chance.

On the day he died, Yamadera-sensei caught Counselor Ishikawa on the way back from the toilets at lunchtime. He asked to discuss what the club had found out. They would meet on the bridge and then go together to a nearby café. Counselor Ishikawa had, wisely, felt that she would not want to go alone. "She was stubborn even back then," Professor Noto explained, "but she knew when she was in over her head." The counselor confided in Professor Noto about the meeting, and the two of them decided to go together.

When they met Yamadera-sensei on the bridge, he seemed annoyed that Professor Noto was there, but he allowed her to come along; he just wanted talk a little with Counselor Ishikawa first. Professor Noto reluctantly agreed to go ahead, but she inexplicably had a bad feeling about it once she crossed the bridge, and she decided to wait at the end instead of going on to the café. She waited for five minutes before thinking she had to go back and find them, but Counselor Ishikawa found her first. Counselor Ishikawa tried to tell Professor Noto what had happened but was inconsolable. "Can you imagine?" said the professor. "This giant woman holding on to me and blubbering like a child—she really wasn't tough when it came to stuff like this."

Professor Noto took over from there, sending Counselor Ishikawa home and coming up with a logical cover story. She invented Counselor Ishikawa's alibi and took all the blame, knowing that Counselor Ishikawa was a bad liar and that if any scrutiny fell on Ishikawa, the truth about Osaka would come out, and Yamadera-sensei's reputation would be ruined.

* * *

"So, why do you think Counselor Ishikawa took her victims?" asked the inspector.

Professor Noto sighed. "She's been dealing with this guilt all these years. Shiho-kun, Kagura-kun, Tsuruya-san—they've all been in situations where they questioned themselves. I think Suo really hoped to find someone who could relate to her."

"Someone besides you?" asked Kudo-kun.

"Did I feel guilty? Sure, but I never did anything so extreme."

"No, but it did change you, didn't it? You were interested in ecology before that, but you abruptly switched to studying neurotransmitters and the mechanisms behind traumatic stress—rather like how Amari-san suddenly showed an interest in brain function, right? Tell me, Professor—how did you come up with the name _Leze_?"

Professor Noto stared back at him. "I plucked it out of thin air."

Kudo-kun shot her a knowing look. "Maybe you did, or maybe you understood that Japanese phonology makes the reproduction of some sounds in other languages difficult, such as the _th_ consonant in _Lethe_."

Inspector Yamato produced one last document—a record of proposed names for Professor Noto's compound. _Leze_ was just one of the proposals, along with _Liti_ and others.

"I like _Liti_," said Kudo-kun. "It's much closer to the original Greek. It's a shame it wasn't selected."

Professor Noto smiled with resignation and sat back in her chair. "I thought so, too."

"Why did you do that, Professor?" asked Kudo-kun.

"It was just something I had to do."

Professor Noto felt some responsibility for Counselor Ishikawa. The trip to Osaka had been Counselor Ishikawa's idea, but Professor Noto had gone along with it, in spite of her better judgment. She'd expected Counselor Ishikawa would tell Yamadera-sensei and had made no move to prevent it. That didn't absolve Counselor Ishikawa, but Professor Noto still believed she could've done better. That feeling had stayed with her in the weeks and months after Yamadera-sensei's suicide, and seeing how depressed and withdrawn Counselor Ishikawa became over it, Professor Noto changed the path of her life, hoping to make things right.

She invented Leze for Counselor Ishikawa. Yamadera-sensei's death had been a deep trauma—but with the help of medication, it was one that Counselor Ishikawa didn't have to face alone. While Leze had powerful effects in high doses, a regular course of treatment would merely dull the emotions associated with a memory. "It's like how you feel about a nightmare," Professor Noto explained. "For most people, that's something you can live with."

But Counselor Ishikawa wasn't satisfied with her treatment. She took her path toward stability into her own hands, abducting Amari-san, Tsuruya-san, and me. Even Professor Noto's drug had failed to give her peace, and in the end, Professor Noto made mistakes all over again.

After a few followup questions, the detectives were satisfied with Professor Noto's account, but they would have to corroborate it with Counselor Ishikawa.

"She won't tell you much you don't already know," Professor Noto warned them, but Inspector Yamato didn't seem concerned, saying they would see about that.

Still, the detectives were confident. As the inspector changed to the other interrogation room, Kudo-kun sneaked into the observation area, looking to track down some of Counselor Ishikawa's statements from twenty years earlier for the inspector, but the other detectives took turns congratulating him. His theory had been vindicated, and his performance—drawing Professor Noto into a trap—had been masterful. Kudo-kun was humble enough to credit all of them in this effort, but he clearly enjoyed the attention, and I wasn't going to rain on his parade. It had been a difficult case for him for many reasons. I was glad he could enjoy solving it. He'd found the answers he'd been searching for. It wouldn't have been right to resent him for that.

He sat down at a computer to pull up some statements, and I walked up behind him. "Well done, Detective," I told him, tapping his shoulder with one finger. "Looks like you were right again."

He looked up at me with a cocky grin, and I expected him to say something like _of course I was_, but he seemed to think better of it. "Yeah," he said. "I'm glad we'll be able to put this to rest."

"Don't hurt yourself holding back," I said.

"Okay, okay," he said, and I wasn't totally convinced he would listen, but there was no time to argue. Inspector Yamato had begun questioning Counselor Ishikawa. There was a crackle in the speakers as new audio was piped into the observation area.

Counselor Ishikawa sat on the far side of the interrogation room, facing us, while Inspector Yamato's back to us but with her face visible in a large, angled mirror. The attorney was unfazed, looking a little bored as Inspector Yamato laid out her evidence on the table. It was a far cry from Professor Noto's description of the young Ishikawa Suo—gruff but emotional and easy to read.

"We've just finished talking with Professor Noto," said the inspector. "She's admitted everything—that she was never there when Yamadera-sensei died. You were."

Counselor Ishikawa didn't seem surprised. "Is there something you want to know?"

"Is it true?"

"I can't say."

Inspector Yamato jotted that down. "I understand she lied for you, but do you really think you can keep protecting her?"

Counselor Ishikawa said nothing, and the inspector proceeded to lay out the scenario, leaving out what was Professor Noto's direct testimony and what was our interpretation of the facts. Counselor Ishikawa was the one who told Yamadera-sensei what they learned in Osaka. Counselor Ishikawa was the one he approached at lunch the day he died. Counselor Ishikawa was the one who walked with him on the Route 403 bridge. Counselor Ishikawa was the one who watched as he climbed over the railing and fell to his death.

"It's your guilt over what happened that night," the inspector concluded, "that drove you to abduct those women, isn't it?"

"I don't know," said the attorney.

The inspector took note of that, too, and by that point, several of the detectives in the observation area were chatting amongst themselves. Had they missed something? Confronted with Noto's testimony, Ishikawa didn't seem even inclined to confess her motives. She was continuing to obfuscate the issue, perhaps to protect Professor Noto from something else that had been omitted. Hattori-san agreed with this theory, but even he had no idea what Professor Noto could still have been hiding. They'd assumed a link between Yamadera-sensei's case, Ishikawa's involvement, and her reasons for abducting me, but that was too great a leap to make.

By that point, Kudo-kun had stopped working the computer to watch Counselor Ishikawa and the inspector. I could see he was struggling with this question, too; he, like the others, had never put much stock in Counselor Ishikawa's stated motivations. When she'd taken me captive, she'd made her goals quite clear: to offer me a choice, an opportunity for absolution and a path toward a fresh start.

"She needs to try a different approach," I told him, referring to the inspector. "Maybe this really does have to do with Yamadera-sensei, but you have to ask why Counselor Ishikawa was interested in a fresh start."

Kudo-kun looked up at me, then back through the glass as Inspector Yamato continued trying to break through the attorney's defenses. "Let's do better than that," he said, offering his hand. "Are you up for it?"

He didn't have to ask twice. I took his hand, and we went together, out of the observation area. Inspector Yamato had been signalled to expect us, but she still didn't like the idea. It was against protocol, and I wasn't a trained interviewer, but Kudo-kun insisted that with the two of them watching over me, they could intervene before anything improper was done. I was uniquely qualified to understand what Counselor Ishikawa had done, and if we could play on that, it might just lead us to the truth.

Inspector Yamato still didn't like it, but Kudo-kun was a persuasive man, and she was inclined to give him leeway. "Don't get caught on tangents," she cautioned us. "If this goes sideways, I'm shutting it down." With that, she opened the door to the interrogation room and led me to the main chair, across from Counselor Ishikawa.

The attorney was surprised and emboldened to see me. "Are you so desperate?" she said to the inspector.

"So what if they're desperate?" I said, folding my hands as I sat. "Sometimes, the desperate play works."

Counselor Ishikawa smiled confidently and shot me an expectant gaze, a challenge for me to begin.

"Just so we're clear," I said, "I'm not here just for them." I nodded toward the back of the room, where Inspector Yamato and Kudo-kun were watching silently. "I'm here for me, too. They want to know why you did what you did. I want to know why you did it to me."

At that, Counselor Ishikawa's challenging gaze turned inward. "It was a mistake. You didn't deserve it. I'm sorry."

"I believe you're sorry, but I can't forgive you yet." I leaned closer. "And maybe I didn't deserve it, but you did pick us for a good reason, didn't you? Amari-san, Tsuruya-san, and I—we all had something in our pasts that we would've liked to put behind us."

"It was a mistake," Counselor Ishikawa insisted. "You were never going to leave all that behind. You suffered for nothing."

"I don't think it's as clear-cut as that," I said. "I think, if you'd caught me at a different time and place, I might've taken you up on your offer."

She frowned. "What makes you say that?"

"Because I basically did make that choice before. When I realized the Organization would never be the same again, that they'd been dealt a lethal blow, I had the choice to leave Miyano Shiho behind, and I did—for a while. I didn't want to go back, and if you'd offered me that overdose of Leze back then, I probably would've taken it. But that was a long time ago, and I already changed my mind about it back then. I choose to live with the past. I live with it because I know now what I didn't understand back then: you can't make a totally clean slate for yourself. The past taints the present, and there's no point in pretending it doesn't."

I caught Kudo-kun watching me in the one-way mirror, and even that stubborn man had to look away politely as I stared back at him.

As for Counselor Ishikawa, she smiled sadly. Though her eyes still had their piercing quality to them, her focus wasn't on me. "It is like that, isn't it? That's a smart way of looking at it."

I felt Counselor Ishikawa might finally answer our questions, so I went directly to what we wanted to know. "Why did you do this?" I asked.

She brushed some hair out of her eyes and leaned on the table. "I can't say; I can't. Minori—she's done too much already."

"You offered me a choice; why?"

"Does it matter now?" She leaned forward, too, meeting my eyes. "You should be thankful. You made the right choice. You didn't give in to temptation. Isn't that enough for you?"

In the one-way mirror, I saw Kudo-kun and Inspector Yamato exchange glances. Inspector Yamato nodded, and Kudo-kun made a move to talk to me, but I made a gesture under the table with my hand, and he stayed back.

"You were curious," I began, still speaking to Counselor Ishikawa. "You made each of us the same offer because you were curious if someone would take it."

Counselor Ishikawa laughed to herself, and she sat back in her chair. "Yes."

"But it wouldn't have brought me peace after all," I went on.

"I hoped it would," she said, "but who knows? You could've forgotten it all and been truly free, but it might've been just a matter of time before you ran into someone from back then or went somewhere you'd been before, and then you might remember some of it."

"Some of it?" I asked.

She nodded, and I could imagine the horror of it. To think if I'd taken the overdose of Leze and forgotten the tragedy of my sister's death, only to wake up one day and remember that she died but not when and how—it was grotesque.

Counselor Ishikawa was looking down, sitting nearly limp in her chair, and I said softly,

"Did you tell Yamadera-sensei what you learned in Osaka?"

Her eyes stayed down. Her face was tight. "I don't remember."

"Where you there on the bridge when he jumped?"

"I don't remember."

I rose from my seat slightly, trying to catch her gaze. "Did you watch as he fell to his death?"

At last, she looked up, her eyes wavering. "I don't remember."


	26. The Day After

The next morning, my alarm went off at 8:30, but I was already awake.

I've heard it's best not to try to force yourself to sleep. I'm sure there's a physiological reason for that, but I think there's also a practical one: if you're going to be awake, you may as well do something useful with that time. Maybe that's the reason. I'm not sure. What I do know is that people who insist on being productive don't know what it's like to lie in bed, watching the time on your watch, clock, or phone approach the alarm you set for yourself. It's the moment when you know you can't wait any longer. You already decided that.

It wasn't that I had nothing to do. There was a pile of clothes waiting to be washed. The refrigerator was nearly empty. The furniture needed dusting. For the timebeing, I tackled the most immediate need. I made myself a breakfast of rice and soup, put on one of my last good outfits, and was out of the house by 9:05. After all, that was the time I was used to leaving. Any later, and I would've missed the bus.

There were no more mysteries to investigate. I was no longer a witness or victim. I was just a graduate student at Shinshu. I had experiments to run and papers to write.

I didn't expect it would be easy to settle back into my usual life, but the atmosphere in the lab was strange that day. Many of the cubicles were unoccupied, and some of the lights hadn't even been turned on. The students and postdocs who were around didn't pay attention to my arrival, so I didn't bother them. For all I knew, a lot of students could've been taking breaks for exams. It was best not to be nosy. I could ask questions, but then they would only ask why I didn't know the answers already. _Where have you been?_ they would wonder. _What have you been doing?_ How would I answer that? To say Amari-san and I had been abducted? No, that would be too much to share, and I wasn't eager to talk about it. For all intents and purposes, I was just another student in the group again. That was all anyone else in the group needed to know. Once I saw the Professor and Kudo-kun off, the messy affair involving Counselor Ishikawa, Amari-san, and me would've been over.

It was far easier to shove those memories aside than it was to find my old self. I spent an hour sorting through my computer; Furuya-san's technicians must've taken the case apart to examine the drives. I had to search for spare screws to put it all back together again, and even then, not everything worked right. University computers are always being updated at the most inconvenient times, forced to reboot over and over as if some electric god had gone on a power trip, and left without network connections until privileges are verified, which always takes longer than it should.

Even once I got everything working well enough, getting back to my paper was hard. I'd completely lost the train of thought that I'd been working on before. I had to read through the text to remember what I'd thought. I'd made it all sound so promising: we could attack brain tumors without using surgery or radiation. Our work could herald a revolution in cancer medicine. I thought less of my old self from two weeks before. She had clearly been taken with Professor Noto's goals and willing to promote lofty work in pursuit of recognition. There are hundreds of good deeds in the world one can accomplish without being recognized.

My mind wandered like that for the better part of an hour while I stared at the blinking cursor, and I grew tired of trying to force words from my brain. Instead, I became curious about the state of the lab. It was half past eleven, and still there was almost no one around. Even Amari-san had yet to show her face. I texted her, asking where she was, and she told me to come by another faculty member's office down the hall.

This colleague of Professor Noto's, specializing in robotics, was being mobbed by a small gaggle of students from our lab. He was ill-prepared for the attention—he hadn't shaved in days, and his hair was unkempt—but he held out both hands to calm the group down and shepherd them into a visualization room, which we often used for presentations and meetings. The robotics professor sent one of the other students to fetch everyone else in the lab. The reason for the meeting was simple, and some had already heard about it, pestering him and other representatives of the school for answers:

Professor Noto had resigned.

The robotics professor wouldn't go into details about why she resigned, and his immediate focus was on supporting ongoing research and students. In the long run, the students could find other advisors at Shinshu or elsewhere. Most likely, some of us would have to transfer to the main campus in Matsumoto. In the meantime, the robotics professor encouraged us to continue our research and let the situation play out.

That answer was unpopular. One of my colleagues was especially persistent about demanding answers. He'd been due to go to a conference the next month. What was going to happen to his funding? Who was in control of the lab and its resources? He was the loudest, but others in the room were worried, too. When you invest years of your life for a course of study, the last thing you want is for it to end up derailed, to wonder where you should go from there and if you should have the perseverance to continue. Of course, to some people, a radical change like this could be an opportunity to reevaluate their lives and break out of bad habits, but there was much more anxiety in the room than enthusiasm. Change is never an easy thing.

For Amari-san and me, Professor Noto's resignation was hard to cope with. Many of our colleagues were bewildered, and Amari-san and I felt uncomfortable telling them why this had happened. Knowing the professor, it was also hard to fathom. She'd dedicated so much of her life to making good on a mistake. How could she abandon it so easily? As far as I knew, she was only facing fines for illegally distributing Leze. It was a stain on her reputation, but she'd never been one to care that much about appearances.

I didn't understand her reasons, but I knew Professor Noto's actions had put all of her students in an awkward position. Even Amari-san was questioning herself. Her quest since her father's death–to understand the function of each part of the brain and how damage to it could affect personality and behavior–could come to an end, and she wondered if she'd be upset about that. "I've learned a lot already," she remarked to me, "and maybe it isn't good to focus too much on one thing in your life."

I'm sure there's some wisdom in that philosophy, but I doubted Professor Noto had been so wise. She was the type of person to make up her mind at a moment's notice and commit to a path wholeheartedly, consequences be damned.

So when lunchtime came, and Amari-san and I were expected at Johnny Christo's, I lingered at my cubicle for a while. I told Amari-san I'd catch up and that she shouldn't wait, but when I finally left the lab ten minutes later, I made a sharp right turn out of the building, heading not for the American restaurant to the east but for Professor Noto's home.

* * *

Professor Noto lived alone in an unusual, modern structure–boxy and upright with a piece cut out of a bottom corner to act as an entryway and overhang. It was more like a piece of art than a home. I found the professor with maps strewn over her dinner table as she planned a trip to the mountains. Her ski gear was already gathered by the sofa. She was practically halfway out the door already. "Is there something you want?" she said brusquely.

I wanted to know why she was resigning, but she scoffed at me.

"You're too smart to ask simple questions," she said. "You know why."

"I know what happened and what you did," I corrected her. "I don't know why you've done this now."

Professor Noto was annoyed with me, and she defended her reasons bluntly. While it was unlikely she would go to jail, her involvement with Counselor Ishikawa reflected badly on the university. She had sought out students for reasons beyond academic performance or potential. She'd invested vast resources—both the university's and her own—to seek a solution for Counselor Ishikawa's suffering, and it had all been wasted. "You will be in better hands with someone whose priority is your development as a scientist," she reasoned. Up to that point, she'd used everyone she'd met to advance the development of Leze. In utilizing our knowledge and skills that way, she had set us all back.

The professor's stated reasons were noble, and knowing what she had done for Counselor Ishikawa, I almost believed them, but the woman in front of me had never been satisfied with sitting idle. Even then, she was in the middle of planning a ski trip.

"What will you do after this?" I asked, gesturing the boots, poles, and backpacks. "Start a company? Find a professorship elsewhere?"

"I'll be retired," she insisted, focusing on making slopes on a map instead of looking at me. "I'll do whatever pleases me."

"You won't be happy that way," I said. "You won't be able to stay away."

At that, the professor put her pen down. "Maybe that's something worth learning," she said, staring me down. After all, she'd spent twenty years of her life, since Yamadera-sensei's death, with a singular goal in mind. There was no harm in taking a break and enjoying herself.

I agreed she could do that for a while, but then who was this really about? Us, at the lab? Or about her? And what would happen when she grew bored of that lifestyle? She'd pick up the pieces of her old life and try to make something of them again, but it would be harder the second time around. She'd never feel fully comfortable with that. She'd be an impostor in her own skin.

"I know who I am, and I'm not going to lose myself," she said. "Maybe you should think about what you want to do. This is an opportunity. If you're not committed to this line of work, you can stop. Go back to Tokyo and be that other girl, or find a position somewhere else. You don't have to be here. Do you even want to be?" She looked back at me with a questioning gaze, and I didn't have an answer for her—not right away.

"I knew what I was getting into," I said, standing over her. "Even if I didn't know what you really wanted from me, I knew what kind of group you were running and what the lab's goals are."

The professor shot me a skeptical look. "As if any of that mattered to you. You and I both know why you came here. You felt guilty. You didn't think you deserved to be happy. You didn't believe you should still be alive. You thought you just _had_ to do something to justify that you were still taking up oxygen. Everyone who helped you get out and take those people down—they were moving on to other things, and you didn't have anything to move on to. And you want to know something? I understood all of that before you sat down in my office five years ago. I understood what you were getting into. Did you? Do you really think you should've come here?"

There were a lot of reasons why I shouldn't have come to Nagano, but that also made me uniquely qualified to understand her position. "I stepped back from the rest of my life once. It's not as easy as you think."

"Please," said the professor, who rolled her eyes. "This group, the lab, Leze—none of it should exist. It was grown from a bad seed." Her eyes rose, and she put on a smile for me. "So I'm letting it go."

But she wasn't. She could tell herself that all she liked, but it wasn't true. She wasn't letting anything go. She was moving it aside, washing it away and putting it out of mind. She was pretending it didn't exist and acting as though saying _oh, I was wrong_ would be enough penance for her mistakes. She was running away from her own guilt. To think I'd never have believed her capable of guilt. No, she could bottle it.

"There's no logic in that," I told her. "I don't care why you became a professor. I don't care why you started the lab or invented Leze. You made mistakes, but they're in the past. That's what you need to let go, Professor!"

Professor Noto stared at me quizzically. "You really believe that?"

"Of course I do."

She rose, and she shot me a knowing look. "You don't. Are you forgetting who you're talking to? I know you. I recruited you. You may go home for the holidays and see the people who took you in and made you a part of their lives, but you leave Nagano behind when you see them, and you leave them behind when you come back. You live in two different worlds, divided by your choice to come work for me, and you work tirelessly to ensure they never meet. That's why you were so anxious not to talk about Kudo Shinichi, isn't it? When you first heard about Kagura-kun's obsession with him, what was your first instinct—to pretend he was a stranger?"

"I have a life here in Nagano," I insisted. "It's not a fantasy!"

"Of course it isn't, but I wouldn't care if it were. That's your business as long as you don't try to lecture me, but you're the last person who can lecture me. Look at you. You're still two halves of a person who hasn't figured out how to become whole. Deep down you're still afraid that that girl never should've left Tokyo. She pursued something foolish, and even now you're trying to insulate her from those mistakes."

Professor Noto's tirade was like the grit of a sandblaster. Each word had little effect on its own, but together, they tore every extraneous argument or excuse away. I'd known she could be blunt, but this tongue-lashing I hadn't expected. Though we'd had our differences, and I'd felt uneasy around her, I'd considered her a mentor. If she'd spent five years trying to polish me into a unique piece of work, those thirty seconds had worn me down close to an inert lump of stone.

Even she understood she may have gone too far. She refused to look at me after a time, and she sat down again, focusing on the resort maps. "Anything else?" she said quietly.

A few words bubbled from inside me, and I did as much as I could to keep restrained while channeling the energy of a rebellious student. "Your reasons are in the past," I told her. "You're about to change your life _today_, and it'll affect all of us. Maybe you shouldn't have founded the lab back then. That doesn't make leaving it right. Your reasons, however wrong they were, no longer matter."

Professor Noto refused to look up, answering me with silence, so I made my way to the door, put on my shoes, and showed myself out.

* * *

After leaving the professor's home, I wandered on my own for a time. Amari-san and Professor Agasa sent me countless messages asking where I was and when I'd make it to lunch. I put them off, saying I had some urgent matters to take care of. I was sorry to miss them, but the Professor would get home all right. He had good people accompanying him.

I ended up south of campus and Professor Noto's apartment, by the sandy banks of the Sai River. There's a park a little over a mile from the lab there, and when I was bored with work or needed some exercise, I would go there from time to time. It wasn't a fancy park; there were old plots of land still held by farmers there, and across the river, there were four all-dirt baseball fields, just like the spot on the Chikuma River where Yamadera-sensei fell to his death. Though the Sai was low, with sand bars exposed in the middle of its path, the water was still bright blue and clear.

I'd thought I could go there to be alone, but the universe wouldn't give me what I wanted. I'm not sure if it was too kind or too cruel for that. Either way, it set its insatiable hound after me—the one force of nature that could never be defeated or deterred.

"There you are," said Kudo-kun, who trotted up to me with a phone in hand. What happened? Are you okay? I've been looking everywhere for you."

That was only half as surprising as to see that he'd found me. He humored me, saying that he'd deduced my position from clever interrogation of Amari-san and a little ingenuity in mobile phone triangulation, but that wasn't what he was there for.

"Sorry," I said. "I've ruined your lunch. I'll pay you back sometime."

He wasn't concerned about the money. He walked with me along the riverbank and asked where I'd gone and why. He'd heard about Professor Noto's resignation, but he was surprised to learn I'd confronted her over it. "I didn't realize you were so attached to your work," he said.

I wasn't clinging to it out of attachment. She was making a mistake and taking the whole lab down with her. I'd tried talking her out of it, but she'd been too stubborn to change her mind. She'd come to realize her dangerous obsession and turned away from it in the most destructive way imaginable.

"Who can blame her?" said Kudo-kun.

No one would blame her, but that didn't make it right.

"If she's going to make mistakes, that's her problem," he argued. "She's an adult. You and Amari-san will find a way to keep the lab in business if that's what you want." He stopped at a fork in the path, and he motioned for me to follow. "Come on. The others still have a table."

I shook my head. "I just want to walk for a while."

"Is this about the lab?"

I shook my head again. "Answer a question for me: when you broke up with Mori-san, you had your reasons, right?"

He winced, embarrassed. "Some reasons they were, but yes, I did."

And even then, he was still thinking of going back to Tokyo, selling his business, and going around the world to find himself. Even though he realized he'd been foolish, that hadn't shaken him from this new path he'd chosen. Why?

He frowned, and he stared over the water, toward the far shore. After some thought, he answered, "Maybe I didn't handle it the right way, but I don't think I was wrong about one thing: I'm not the kind of man I want to be."

Even though his initial decision was impulsive, given the chance to rethink his it, he came to the same conclusion. And he called himself a great detective! In truth, he was no better than the rest of us—no more likely to keep his mind from running in circles when it mattered most, no further removed from the corrupting impulse to make oneself better even when every step could only lead him down the wrong path. People like him, or Professor Noto, projected a confident façade, all for their own sakes.

That day, as we walked along the bank of the Sai, I let go of the idea of Kudo Shinichi. Kudo-kun could never live up to his own image, and I realized I didn't want him to. This way, I could tell him the blunt truth: if he sold his business and went on this tour traveling the world, he'd be making a mistake. When he felt like he wasn't treating his fiancée right, he could've talked with her and listened to her instead of getting twisted up in his own head. It was never a problem that he was a die-hard mystery geek. His problem was how he reacted to it and what he came to believe about himself.

"So my advice to you," I told him, "from one fool to another, is this: let it go, and talk to someone instead of trying to fix it all by yourself."

He looked ahead with a wry smile. He doesn't like being lectured, but he has the sense to know when someone else is right. "Do you know someone I can talk to about that?" he asked coyly.

"I might," I said, "but only if you listen to her 100% of the time."

He smiled at that, and as we headed further downriver, he offered his hand to help navigate an set of broken steps on the walkway. After all, a little support goes a long way when navigating an irregular and uneven path.

We made a loop, turning back around when the park path ended and merged into the main road. Once we were back around campus, Kudo-kun snuck a message to Hattori-san, asking about lunch. The others were still waiting for us, assuming Kudo-kun would find me, so there was still a chance to eat and see everyone before saying goodbye.

"Do you want to go?" Kudo-kun asked me.

If he'd asked me a half-hour before, I would've said no, but in seeing clearly the mistakes Professor Noto and Kudo-kun had made, I no longer thought so much of my own. Perhaps I had come to Nagano for the wrong reasons. I'd stayed in Tokyo as Haibara Ai for too long as well. Life is messy and full of fits and starts, and I think the biggest mistake of all was trying to hide all of my follies. I tried to project that I was ordinary in ways that I wasn't. I wore a mask for a long time, so long it became difficult to remove, and when it was ripped from me, I was uncomfortable with what was underneath, but even the people I'd most admired and looked up to have worn masks, too, so why should I be afraid to meet them?

"Yes," I told Kudo-kun. "Let's go. I'm hungry."

He laughed, squeezing my hand tighter, and we climbed together up the path from the riverbank.


	27. Past and Present

When Kudo-kun and I arrived at Johnny Christo's, I wasn't sure what to expect. We were already 45 minutes behind schedule, and it was impossible to think the others had waited so long without questions, but as soon as we stepped through the door, Hattori-san was there to escort us to the table. "There you are," he said. "What have you two been up to together? Find your own time to play around."

"So sorry," I said. "We would've been done sooner, but Kudo-kun just couldn't get going. I'll have to do better to help him out next time."

Hattori-san laughed—even more so when he saw Kudo-kun's shocked expression.

"Don't worry," I whispered in his ear. "It's a common problem."

Kudo-kun laughed to himself. "You're something else," he said. I took that as a compliment.

We sat down just as the server was taking away a mostly-cleaned-out basket of onion rings. I arranged for some vegetarian knishes to tide Kudo-kun and me over while we decided on our lunches. Of course, the others were welcome to help themselves, too, and while we waited, I explained what really happened to keep me away. I told them about my visit to Professor Noto and how foolish I'd been. I'd tried to argue with her when her mind was made up, and I hadn't handled her stubbornness well. That was the reason I'd nearly missed our lunch.

The others were too understanding. They offered kindness and platitudes when none were deserved, but that's what friends and family do sometimes. As Hattori-san said, "Everyone at this table has been through worse and done dumber things—well, except me—and we've survived." I don't agree with part of that, but he was right on the gist of it. Still, I couldn't help but turn that back at him:

"Haven't you tried to masquerade as Kudo-kun and failed terribly because you can't speak like you're from Tokyo?"

Hattori-san was too busy defending his dedication to the Osaka dialect to notice, but Kudo-kun and the Professor looked alarmed. I gestured to both of them to stay calm. Amari-san seemed confused, so I told her,

"We've been through a lot," I explained, "and led interesting lives."

Amari-san understood, and she put on a polite smile. "I hope I can hear about it someday."

I was sure she would, sooner rather than later. Once the knishes arrived, we showered Amari-san with enough stories to send her to fangirl heaven. We told tales of my daring escape from my handlers, despite having poisoned myself with my own drug; of fooling their most dangerous operatives on a train; and more. The years had transformed these death-defying incidents into daring adventures—or at least, that's how we made them sound. It sounded better to say I'd been brave and bold even though I'd sometimes been scared out of my mind. Though I'd spent so many days afraid, my perseverance had been rewarded. Amari-san appreciated the gravity of what I'd endured—never seeking to press me into saying more than I was willing to, but also interested in listening. The two halves of my live came together that day, and they didn't crash or collide. They were like two pieces of skin, long separated by an incision, finally becoming whole again. That day, as the servers took the empty plate of knishes away, I sent a message to my friend Yoshida-san, inviting her to Nagano to visit the lab and enjoy herself on the next holiday. It didn't take her long to say yes.

Unfortunately, lunch was too short. I'd already delayed everyone, and while Kudo-kun enjoyed the opportunity to force a felafel on Hattori-san (who thought it fascinating—maybe I hadn't given him enough credit), we couldn't take much time to enjoy ourselves once lunch was served. Amari-san and I needed to get back to the lab. Hattori-san, Kudo-kun, and the Professor had trains to catch, too. We couldn't afford to waste anymore time, so we ate and said our goodbyes. Hattori-san left first, but Kudo-kun and the Professor stood aside by the doorway as we were leaving. With a brickwork facade as a backdrop, you could've thought they were replaying a scene from a mob movie—so hushed was their conversation. I asked them what they were being so secretive about, and Kudo-kun sheepishly explained he had some more business to see to in Nagano, and he was asking the Professor whether he wanted to come along or go back to Tokyo alone. Of course, the Professor was never one to let his age get in the way of an adventure, but I was curious just what this business of Kudo-kun's entailed.

"The case may be wrapped up," he said, "but I don't think my work here is done—not yet."

"And here you worry about being too wrapped up in mysteries," I remarked.

He huffed at that, amused at the thought. "That's a good way of looking at it." He touched my shoulder. "We'll call before we leave."

I wasn't about to have that. If he was leaving Nagano, we'd say our goodbyes face-to-face. Besides, I was curious what Kudo-kun thought so important to stay a little while longer. Kudo-kun thought that was fitting. We'd started this case together. It seemed only right to end it that way.

* * *

Kudo-kun called for a car since he'd already returned his rental. He hadn't planned on doing anything more in Nagano, but our conversations before and during lunch and had spurred him to action—to follow his gut. He was comfortable with that; after all, his instincts weren't telling him to throw out reason. Rather, they were telling him to consider a course of action he hadn't thought of before.

Our destination was Chikuma. Kudo-kun planned to speak with the widow Yamadera, but I thought that could be hurtful. How would anyone react to learning that the story of a partner's death had been a lie? On top of that, she would find out that the full truth had been lost forever. I worried that, at best, Kudo-kun would leave her with a gaping hole in her life that could never be filled.

Kudo-kun understood those risks and felt comfortable going ahead in spite of them. "It's impossible to ask her," he admitted, "but I think she would want to know she's been lied to, that we've done as much as we can to uncover the truth. It's not unusual; evidence is lost or destroyed all the time. Sometimes there's never any evidence at all. It's a detective's duty to deliver as much truth as possible. People hire me for that. People need me for that."

A detective's obligations are heavy, but Kudo-kun seemed at peace, confident and certain in what he should do. He was that type of person, after all: he needed to act on his innate sense of duty. Ignoring it only frustrated him. It would be a mistake to think he was a totally altruistic man. He wasn't. He would always have that urge to seek mysteries, and some of that was for his own satisfaction. Still, I think there is something to admire in someone channeling one's selfishness to noble ends. It's an act of recognition that one wants and needs things that might not benefit others unless deliberate choices are made.

Inside the bakery, Kudo-kun did his best to ease Yamadera-san into the news. While our arrival was difficult to soften, Kudo-kun only asked to speak with Yamadera-san privately whenever she had an opportunity. We could have a slice of cake while we waited, but Yamadera-san delegated her duties to other staff to see us as soon as possible. Kudo-kun suggested she get something to drink before sitting down with us, and though Kudo-kun felt it nearly impossible to ask Yamadera-san's opinion on the matter before giving her the news, he still tried to offer a choice: knowing that Professor Noto lied about what happened to Yamadera-sensei that day, the teacher's wife could ask to hear more, or she could go back to work at her bakery, and Kudo-kun would never bother her again. It wasn't an easy choice, and Kudo-kun admitted he might not be staying long enough to hear her answer, but he left Inspector Yamato's card on the table, halfway between him and Yamadera-san.

Yamadera-san hesitated to make a decision. She picked up the card and held it up, over the middle of the table. She read it without accepting it. "It was so long ago," she said to no one in particular. "My life is so different from back then. I don't think Ryo would want me to live in the past." Only then did her eyes leave the card. "What good would it do me to know?"

"Only you can answer that," said Kudo-kun. "I can offer you the truth. I can't tell you if it will help because I don't know."

Yamadera-san thought that was a wise answer, and she thought about the matter for some time before coming to a decision. She slid the card back across the table to Kudo-kun and instead arranged for an assistant manager to cover for her for the rest of her time that day. "Where do I need to go?" she asked.

* * *

The widow Yamadera drove us to police headquarters, and Kudo-kun started filling her in on Professor Noto's deception. Counselor Ishikawa wouldn't be able to say much, so it was important to give Yamadera-san as much context as possible, but I worried it wouldn't be enough. I left Professor Noto a message saying when we'd meet the police. It would be her decision to add her voice. All I did was let her know it was happening.

At headquarters, Inspector Yamato had already prepared to receive us. The guard let Yamadera-san's vehicle through the gate, and the inspector was waiting for us in the lobby. She introduced herself, shook the widow's hand, and laid out how the interview would happen: the police would escort the widow Yamadera to an interrogation room, where Counselor Ishikawa would be brought from a holding cell. The police wouldn't leave the widow alone with Counselor Ishikawa, but otherwise, the interview could continue as long as the police or the widow wished.

"Is there anything you'd like to ask us," said the inspector, "before we get started?"

The widow looked to Kudo-kun, who only nodded in support.

"No," said Yamadera-san. "I'm ready."

Yamadera-san invited Kudo-kun and me to go with her and verify Counselor Ishikawa's story, so we went together to the interrogation room, where Counselor Ishikawa was waiting. The attorney already knew what was happening and was ready to confess her sins, but it wasn't easy. Yamadera-san was as thorough as a detective herself. Though she'd been taken aback to hear that her husband's circumstances were different from what she'd been told, she'd put the pieces together quickly. She'd met Counselor Ishikawa several times before, at the bakery, and had pegged her as a strange woman. She asked Counselor Ishikawa why the attorney had bought gyoza from her and used them in the abductions. The counselor had a hard time maintaining her composure.

"I thought I should support you," said the attorney.

"Support me in the process of crimes you were committing?" asked the baker.

Counselor Ishikawa looked away. "I'm sorry. I didn't think about that."

"What happened between you and my husband?"

The counselor grimaced. "I've spent so much of my life trying to forget that day."

"Isn't there something you can tell me?"

A silence. Counselor Ishikawa struggled to speak, but the door opened, and in came Professor Noto, escorted by a police officer. The professor took one look at me, and her eyes lingered for a moment before she sat down next to Counselor Ishikawa.

"I wish I were seeing you again under better circumstances, Yamadera-san," said the professor. She looked over Counselor Ishikawa and understood the situation. "Suo has a hard time talking about this," she explained. "I'll fill in some gaps, but there's a lot I don't know, either." She took Counselor Ishikawa's hand. "We'll just do the best we can, all right?"

Counselor Ishikawa swallowed and nodded. She sat taller in her chair and steadied herself, looking Yamadera-san in the eye. "I don't remember much," she admitted, "but I went to visit the bakery out of the blue one day, and it was overwhelming. Everything I felt from back then came flooding back to me, and I can't tell you why."

Yamadera-san was still bewildered with the situation, but I confirmed it for her. The counselor had told us herself: she'd long forgotten what happened the day Yamadera-sensei died, but those events did change her, and she was still changed by them even that day. Only then could Yamadera-san give up a little on her bewilderment and anger. Counselor Ishikawa was still shaky. To continue to pressure her would've been cruel and pointless, and sometimes, it's only fair to acknowledge that in great mistakes everyone suffers.

Having brought the women together, Kudo-kun was no longer needed. Their reconciliation was up to them. Yamadera-san would decide whether to forgive, and only Counselor Ishikawa could choose to accept it, but there was one clue. Kudo-kun and I met with the inspector in the observation room to say our goodbyes, and as we were talking, the widow Yamadera began to laugh. Counselor Ishikawa had admitted that she was only mildly fond of gyoza, and the widow had found the whole thing absurd. Her laughter put Professor Noto and Counselor Ishikawa at ease, and the detectives took that, cautiously, as a good sign. This meeting was just the first step toward healing. It was nothing to be too proud of, and yet Kudo-kun couldn't help but enjoy it. He often solved cases, but he only sometimes helped the living in doing so. It was a rare reward for him.

"Savor it while you can," said the inspector. "I know I will."

"For twenty more weeks?" asked Kudo-kun.

"Twelve weeks," said the inspector. "I'm not going to work until I pop, you know!"

"Ah, my mistake," he said. "Still, congratulations. You both must be thrilled."

"We are." That was all the inspector said, paralyzed by a fit of awkwardness. After all, what can you say to someone who's still coming off a difficult breakup, who expected to get married and have children with a woman who's since moved on? Those dreams weren't going to come true for him on the same schedule he'd expected. All he could do was take things one day at a time and take solace in knowing that, on that day, he'd done something good.

* * *

With their train soon to arrive, Kudo-kun and the Professor headed for the station. I walked with them a short ways; my apartment wasn't in the same direction, so we soon came to a point where we needed to say our goodbyes. Despite the tight timing, the Professor became interested in a jewelry shop, and he went inside for a while, looking for some tools. Kudo-kun and I waited outside. We watched him through the window. He shot me an apologetic smile, but he kept talking with a sales clerk; it didn't seem like he'd be finished anytime soon.

"You know," said Kudo-kun, "I feel like I don't understand what happened these past two weeks, but I do feel pretty sure about one thing: when I get home, if you want to just talk, you can give me a call. I know you might not want to think about all that until you've graduated, but I'll listen."

He was uncomfortable. He was trying to steady himself, but he'd never dealt well with personal matters. It was taking him a lot to stand there and look halfway composed, so I couldn't resist teasing him just a little.

"What if I want to do more than just talk?" I asked.

That wasn't an answer he'd expected. He fumbled for words. "Uh, well, that's okay, too!"

"Then do me a favor instead," I told him. "You call me when you back to Tokyo. I'll need to know the Professor got home safe, among other things."

"Among other things?" he echoed.

"Yes."

The Professor looked back again through the glass and smiled, and I wondered if he really needed those tools or if he had other ideas. Perhaps because I was distracted with that question, Kudo-kun managed to sneak around me, whispering rudely in my ear,

"Just can't go more than a few hours without hearing my voice, huh?" he said.

I elbowed him lightly. "Don't get full of yourself."

"I'm not full of myself," he protested. "I'm actually surprised. I wasn't sure what you wanted."

I met the Professor's gaze while he was still at the sales counter, and I took a few steps to the side, out of sight of the store interior. "I've yearned for something unattainable, longed for attention from someone who was perfect in his own way. Those sorts of feelings are comfortable because you know nothing will ever come of them, so you could say I wanted a lot and nothing at the same time."

Kudo-kun followed me, leaving the Professor's sight. "And now?"

"Now," I said, "I don't yearn for anything anymore. What was unattainable is now a bond that is real, and I know better than to seek out perfection because it doesn't exist. The two of us—we've been through hell, some of it self-inflicted, and I hope, selfishly, that no one else will ever understand that the way we do."

"I'd like that," he said.

"But that's not all," I told him. "Like I said: give up on that trip and accept that you are who you are and that it's all right." I smiled. "It's better to want what's best for someone than to merely want them for yourself, don't you think?"

Kudo-kun scoffed. "You're full of surprises sometimes," he said. "I hope one day I'll understand you."

"I'd be flattered if you spent your whole life trying."

"Oh, would you?" He laughed, and he glanced back toward the store. "I might do that, which means you'll never get rid of me."

"I'd like to see you try!"

He smiled, and he opened his arms for me, so we could embrace one last time. "I'm glad we can talk like this," he said. "Goodbye, Haibara."

I said my goodbyes, too, but just as he pulled away, I took hold of his collar and laid a kiss on his lips. "Call," I insisted when we were finished, and though he was flustered, he promised he would.

Kudo-kun left on the Hokuriku Bullet Train at a quarter to five, and our time together in Nagano came to an end.

* * *

I went grocery shopping on my way back, and I returned home with four bags of supplies to get me through the week. My first proper meal since the ordeal had ended would be clam chowder. I'd enjoyed chowder in America, but I'd made it only rarely since coming back to Japan. It used to remind me of more dangerous times, but I realized there was no logic in those feelings. Chowder was a fine dish on its own. There was nothing criminal about it. If anything, it was fitting to be able to enjoy the dish, far from where I'd first tried it and from the younger me who had been kept under control. Maybe there was nothing logical in trying to spite people who would never know I enjoyed clam chowder that day, but if one must be illogical, I think it's better to enjoy it.

It took some trial and error, but I managed to put together a decent bowl of chowder on my first try. I'd have to work on it in the future. I made three small bowls for my family and set them aside. I'd once pushed my sister to try clam chowder. She hadn't cared for it. Still, if any remnant of her were out there, I hoped she would appreciate it.

Some days I realize, as if anew, how different it is for someone my age to be without family. Certainly I'm not unique in that respect. Rather, it's something that most people simply can't imagine properly. They try, of course, but there are countless little things you don't think of: no one to write cards to on holidays, no one to catch up with or gripe about to other family members. I had the Professor and my friends back in Tokyo—people whom I'd made into a second family. Still, in spite of all their good intentions, there's always a slight feeling that such bonds, while they exist, are partly at the pleasure of everyone involved. Family isn't like that. Family can be disappointed in you or choose not to stick by you. That day, however, I wasn't worried about any of that. I put out the bowls, lit some incense, and went on with dinner.

Amari-san started messaging me partway through dinner, and I decided to put her on the phone instead of alternating typing and eating. She was sorry to bother me, but she wanted to make some plans for the weekend. She was going north to see her father's family, and she hoped I might be available afterward to hang out. I didn't have plans, so any time or place would be fine. "If you need me for any reason," I said, "I'll be there." She told me not to worry, but she appreciated that.

While we were talking, an email came through the lab mailing list. Professor Noto had written a letter for the whole group denying she'd sent any resignation. While she was still facing an investigation and possible sanctions from the university, she expected that we would all continue our research diligently, and she would fight to come back to the group. "We're all striving to enrich science and mankind," she wrote. "Even if we fail or make mistakes in life, we shouldn't lose sight of the importance of our work or how meaningful it is—not just to humanity but to ourselves." Amari-san laughed after reading it. It was very typical of Professor Noto. Still, she thought it was a good letter, and I did, too.

After dinner, I put on some music. Okino Yoko's comeback album seemed appropriate, with enough of a beat and rhythm to lose oneself. Sometimes I don't like to hear myself think. I just want to work on instinct, and I thought that would help me get over the hump with my paper. Of course, no sooner than I opened my laptop did a message disturb my phone once again. This time, it was Kudo-kun, who dutifully reported that he had yet to make to Tokyo. He'd been sidetracked investigating an attempted murder.

I messaged him back, saying he needed to stop obsessively investigating murders, but he called me up and insisted this was not his fault. "A hitman got on the train and tried to assassinate someone in the green car. What was I supposed to do?" At any rate, the case had been solved thanks to him, and they were already on the move again.

"Is that all you wanted to talk about?" I asked. "You just wanted to brag about how you tracked down an assassin in less than an hour to get back to Tokyo before dark?"

I could hear him rolling his eyes on the other side of the phone. "What are you up to? Have you had dinner?"

I told him I was trying to write my paper and about the clam chowder, which from the ingredients he deduced I'd met someone from New England (minus Rhode Island), which I thought was disturbing.

"Is it from your time in America?" he asked. A silly question considering it was obvious, but I appreciated that he asked.

"Yes," I said. "In spite of everything, I liked some things about it—the food, the sea, the snow."

Kudo-kun understood that. His visits to Hawaii and the west coast of the States didn't feature much snow, but sometime he did think it would be nice to go to the mountains of Nevada and do some skiing.

"One of these days?" I said.

"One of these days," he said.

We got to talking about cases he'd been asked to work in America. All of a sudden, his urge for travel had turned into work! But I didn't mind that. It suited him, and he could still relax a little while working, too, if he wanted to. Eventually the conversation turned to Holmes's cases involving America. Kudo-kun would be the first to point out that Doyle's depiction of the Mormon religion in _A Study in Scarlet_ was not faithful to reality, but he thought Doyle's use of America as a foreign land for cases fascinating, especially the background of the American Civil War in "The Five Orange Pips".

Kudo-kun could talk about Holmes for days. I told him I would listen if he didn't mind that I worked a little while we were talking, and he thought that was fine. For some reason, I had the urge to work on the introduction of my paper. Usually, I leave that section for last since it's all about setting the stage for the rest of the article, but this time, I thought it would be good to describe broadly what we tried to do and why. Scientific writing in journals isn't so different from other writing. It still has to tell a story of why the work was important and worth pursuing. It just does that in a different style.

I moved the cursor to the introduction and after a moment's hesitation, I wrote,

"Tumors of the brain are uniquely difficult to treat due to the relative impermeability of the blood-brain barrier. Many systemic chemical treatments cannot cross the barrier, as well as most agents that specifically target cancerous cells. For these reasons, the development of a targeted agent that can cross the barrier would have unique potential…"

I took a few seconds to think about whether to end the sentence there or continue. Eventually, I settled on this:

"…a targeted agent that can cross the barrier would have unique potential to save lives."

That was, after all, why we were doing this research. Sure, some overzealous editor, or perhaps even Professor Noto, could tell me to excise that last phrase. It was obvious. It didn't need to be there, but I wanted it there. Even if the pursuit of knowledge is a selfish one, a proper scientist never loses sight of the greater good her work can achieve.

Though I had more to do, I felt accomplished just finishing that phrase, and I closed my laptop, listening more closely to Kudo-kun, who had started talking about the case he'd just solved. When he didn't expect it, I shared with him my conclusion that the hitman had posed as the conductor, which he exclaimed was right. "How did you guess?" he demanded. He hadn't even started to give hints.

I delivered my deduction right away, and though he was critical (he felt I'd gotten lucky and had jumped the gun), he gave me only some credit for it, and we talked about the case, my paper, and other matters of passing fancy for the rest of the train ride and into the night.


	28. The Revised Edition & Afterword

**Note on the Revised Edition**

After much consideration, I decided to push forward with a major revision of _Nagano_, with the main goal of stripping out the ambiguity in Shiho and Shinichi's relationship. Ultimately, I felt I did not capitalize on that ambiguity properly, and the story is much easier to understand through the lens of knowing that they are still the same Shiho and Shinichi from canon, just removed through the passage of time.

As a result I've significantly rewritten parts of the first few chapters and isolated sections in later chapters. For the most part, the story is the same, but I believe this version is more accessible and allows for a proper focus on the dynamic between the two characters in a clear light.

The remainder of this afterward pertains to the original edition.

-Muphrid, 2020 July 28

**Afterword**

The future never turns out the way you expect it. When I first had the idea for "this" story, it was years ago, and the scene I imagined was Shinichi racing back to a restaurant, where Ran was waiting, after having solved a case on the street. Shiho would've been involved, too, living in the area but as an adult. _After the Black Curtain Falls_ is the title I came up with at the time. There really wasn't much more to the idea than that. I didn't think I would ever write it, but here we are.

Aside from pieces I've never finished, I think _Nagano_ has been the hardest to write. It's my first real foray into mystery fiction, and I struggled with how to incorporate those storytelling ideas with my style. I started at least two drafts of _Nagano_ upwards of thirty thousand words, scrapping both in favor of the draft you see here. I had to improvise a lot, especially during Shiho's captivity, Shiho's confrontation with Shinichi, and the final arc. It's been so difficult to write, but in the end, I think _Nagano_ is the most novel-like of my recent works, and I'm proud of it.

A History of Nagano

Though _After the Black Curtain Falls_, the original idea for _Nagano_ was quite different, I had the rough idea for what _Nagano_ would be like rather early on. The second line of my outline file asks the question, "What would be the ingredients in a Shinichi/Shiho falling in love story?" The basic elements of Shinichi and Shiho being removed from their days fighting the Organization were there, though they were more overtly friendly in this concept, and their past history together was never as hidden or shrouded in mystery as it is in the second draft of _Nagano_.

It's a crucial part of fanfiction, or at least fanfiction as I write it, to understand the characters you're borrowing from canon, to choose what underexplored aspects to delve into, and to justify your deviations from them. I spent a great deal of time trying to understand Shinichi and Shiho–their strengths and their foibles. One aspect I thought interesting at the time was that Shinichi and Shiho are both performative people, who maintain specific personas in the company of others, which helps them control situations. In this way, their behaviors are reflected in each other.

Early on I had the idea that Shinichi and Ran had broken up, though not as dramatically as in the second full draft of _Nagano_. The idea that Shinichi would be a little wounded and trying to recover from that has always interested me, in part because it helps avoid love triangles and also explores the conflict between being a detective and pursuing other interests in life. Over the course of further outlining, I came to focus on that breakup more and more, making it a sore spot and then inverting the situation entirely, with Shinichi breaking up with Ran unexpectedly. Earlier drafts had Shinichi spurred to act in part due to seeing Ran with a new boyfriend. I think I moved away from that to avoid love triangle baggage on that side as well.

The very earliest recognizable concept of _Nagano_ involved Shinichi investigating a case on his own in Nagano, calling upon Shiho's help as he meets resistance, and meeting Shiho's advisor (who was named _Mayuzumi_ at the time) and best friend (who was named _Ayane_ and was a die-hard Heiji fan to contrast with Shiho being a Shinichi fan). The core concept of Shiho keeping her past with Shinichi secret was a fun gag, not a plot-altering detail. Eventually, I grew bored of this concept only because the overt plot seemed boring; Shinichi and Shiho were chasing a hacker for unclear reasons, under the noses of Rei Furuya and possibly Akai, who were keeping watch on Shiho and her APTX research.

At that point, the idea morphed into its next major iteration: seeking a missing person, namely the brother of "Ayane," who would only later be renamed _Amari_. Amari's missing brother, in this concept, would've been killed for his aspirations as a writer; it's always dangerous as a writer to write about writers, but I promise I've never killed a competitor. This concept of the story dealt with aspirations to be great, to compete and to achieve something. It was coherent but, perhaps, a little dull, as Shinichi and Shiho were flirting in rather predictable ways as the case unfolded.

The characters who would end up in the Ikeda Literature Club were created at this point: Minori Noto, Satoru Watanbe, and Tetsuo Otsuka, with Rena Hayasaka coming in later. They were initially comrades of "Kyoya Ayane" and all suspects in his murder.

I invested pretty heavily in this concept, but I struggled with how to pace the overall plot progression and how to make it run parallel with the relationship progression. At the time, I was still hoping to reuse a lot of the "three ordeal" structure I used in _The Second Coming_. Of course, if you've read _Second Coming_, you recognize that it's very unusually structured, more like a series of short stories strung together than a single novel. In trying to map the structure of each of those short stories into an entire novel, I had a lot of problems, and they ultimately dissuaded me from trying to enforce a strict structure on the story. Still, my struggles with that structural question partly explain why I abandoned the concept of the death of "Kyoya Ayane". I was bored with the idea, and I didn't feel enthusiastic about the questions of achieving greatness. Eventually, the plot turned on Sharon Vineyard being a secret benefactor of Shiho's work, and really, that was too much.

Here we reach the third major iteration of the concept, where many of the major elements come into play. These two paragraphs are probably recognizable as close to, but not exactly like, the current story:

_How about this? The Watanabe Clan's boss, Satoru Watanabe, seeks early access to the drug Shiho has been developing, hoping to reverse the aging process and live on. His son, Tetsuo Watanabe, obviously has issues with this, as it threatens the succession of the Watanabe Clan. At the center of this operation is the Watanabe Clan's chief scientist, Minori Noto, who developed the Eraser, a memory-blocking drug. Minori's motives for developing the Eraser go beyond helping a criminal organization. When she was younger, she suffered an extreme trauma–trapped on a lifeboat, her mother refused to eat in order to keep young Minori alive. Minori has always been resentful against the men on that lifeboat who refused to give her and her mother more food to eat. Minori was injured, and they didn't wish to waste food on her._

_Shinichi gets involved when the Eraser is used against one of Shiho's friends, Kagura Amari, as the boss of the Watanbe clan seeks information on Shiho's research. He gets involved with Tetsuo Watanabe, and initially it appears that this is about a power struggle wtihin the Watanbe clan, of which the effort to seek out the chemist Minori Noto is just a small part._

I played with some of the details for a while to try to get the story in the right place. In one draft, Minori Noto was another student and Shiho's friend, closer to her than even Amari, but eventually I zeroed in on the idea that Noto should be Shiho's advisor, evasive in some ways but direct in others.

At this point, Noto was the villain, and I kept iterating on the basic framework of the story to try to make it work. Later on I shifted things around to introduce "Soun Kuonji" as another member of the high school club. Kuonji was effectively the early prototype for Suo Ishikawa, whom I invented later on as Noto's best friend and constant comrade. In that concept, Noto was the villain but had used Leze to the point she'd forgotten it, and her friends from the club all conspired to keep that secret from her (as she had been destructive and suicidal when learning of her past deeds previously). Ishikawa was the point-woman for that effort, and only later on did I swap their roles, with Ishikawa being the destructive one and Noto being her keeper.

At that point, we're quite close to what ended up as the final product, and most of what I kept changing was how the story should be told. Initially, I thought for sure this would be Shinichi's story of falling in love with Shiho, and thus I told it from his point of view. Only in the very latest concept did I switch that around, telling the story from Shiho's point of view and having her be evasive and deceptive regarding her relationship with him.

I felt this worked for several reasons. I imagined Shiho would be writing a book and trying to gloss over her relationship with Shinichi, so she could present in ways that an audience–who knows her relationship with him–would not find questionable but that real readers of the story would wonder about. The story, deliberately, seems like an alternate universe but doesn't have to be. Admittedly, I would've liked to carry out that conceit through the end, but I felt that much of the power of Shiho's change of heart would be lost if it still seemed as though she and Shinichi never knew each other and were meeting for the first time. Too much of why she went to Nagano is painted in a different light by his presence in her life, and I was unwilling to leave that up to interpretation. In addition, the scene with Shinichi and Shiho at New Year's, which I had carried through two previous drafts, was too good to let go of.

Ultimately, I found the change to Shiho's POV rewarding. The distance she tries to keep from Shinichi overtly is at odds with the closeness she desires from him, and the dual life she leads, presenting one image to Amari and her coworkers in Nagano versus what she shows Shinichi, is a principal point of inner conflict in the piece. It's through Shiho's POV and the ambiguousness with which she greets Shinichi that the first arc of the story is possible–Amari's abduction. I really enjoyed the sense of immediacy through that arc, which is something that previous drafts lacked in pursuing a murder or cold case.

There's a great deal that could've been in _Nagano_. Some of my favorite scenes from earlier drafts involved Shinichi and Shiho maintaining their relationships with the Detective Boys. Alas, with the setting entirely away from Tokyo in this draft, it wasn't meant to be. Other scenes I had in mind but that ended up on the cutting room floor included Shinichi and Shiho having a dinner date, followed by attending a soccer game; the reception for Professor Noto receiving an award from the city, with Shinichi and Shiho getting dolled up for dinner; and more.

On Noto and Ishikawa

My principal creations for this story took a while to come into focus. I realized early on I was writing Noto to be a gentle old woman, and that's quite different from the version you see now–aggressively following her own set of rules. Shiho's tension with Noto makes it hard, in retrospect, to imagine Shiho trusting Noto enough to work with her. Perhaps it was the fact that Noto wasn't a nice woman yet was successful anyway that made an impression on her. Noto is by no means a gentle woman, but she has a strong sense of her debts and what is required of her to repay them. She is protective of Ishikawa, almost to a fault.

I switched the role of protector and perpetrator between Ishikawa and Noto for several reasons. I felt Noto would always be a natural suspect, even if she were merely confused rather than deliberately deceiving Shinichi and Shiho. I also thought she made a better red herring. This way, Shiho's frustrations with Noto don't need to be reexamined in light of the culprit's identity.

Ishikawa was initially a stoic character, but in this draft, I needed to find her voice. Her plot seemed to demand someone who could persuade and be manipulative. She's also, ostensibly, a lawyer, which means she should have some fluidity with words. I tried to compromise, making her reasonably conversational but still having some standoffishness. She can speak fluidly but only when she tries to. In the end, Ishikawa should still give off the vibe of this tall, imposing woman who is more emotional than she appears. She dearly appreciated with Yamadera-sensei tried to do for her. Her guilt is crippling, and it's her quest to find someone else who would make the same choice as her, to find that she is not uniquely weak, that drives her. In the end, one way of looking at _Nagano_ is that fools seek the companionship of other fools, hoping not to be the only fool left in the universe.

On Amari

Amari was initially conceived of as more of a comic relief character, but as I developed her storyline for the first third of the story, she became better fleshed out and more realistic. Her starry-eyed personality that had been intentionally exaggerated for effect became more of an in-story personality she'd effected.

In retrospect, I feel that Amari is underutilized in the final half of the story, but she still represents something Shiho aspires to: a clean slate, the chance to be normal, and so on. That Amari ends up being as damaged and in as much pain as Shiho has been is part of the shock of the first third of the story.

In the end, I like Amari much better this way. Someone who tries to be happy and to enjoy life is a much more compelling character than someone who naturally is happy and bubbly. There is a place for such people, of course, but I admire people who have to exert effort—who have to try—to be the kind of person they want to be.

On Shinichi

In putting the emphasis on Shiho, Shinichi became a smaller part of the story—ultimately a change I think for the best. After all, there is a romantic component to their relationship, and not everyone is into that. It seems like an easier sell, in my opinion, if the story is more Shiho-focused than Shinichi-focused.

Still, Shinichi's sense of being adrift helps connect him to Shiho, and he himself says that her example is something he considered when trying to find himself. I'm often interested in taking canon characters and putting them in new and unusual situations. I can't think of another time where Shinichi is so lost and questioning of himself. I wanted to avoid pushing him toward rejecting detective work altogether; in the end, he still loves mysteries. He would still try to stay in that community somehow.

I think this partly reflects my vision of what kind of man Shinichi is. He has many people in his orbit but only a few people who enjoy his confidence. Ran is one. Heiji is another. Shiho is one of them, too, but in canon he keeps some things from her. Then again, perhaps he keeps some things from everyone, and even the people closest to him are all kept in the dark about one thing or another. Separated from Ran, Shinichi would be too proud to rely on her further. He wouldn't want to deal with Heiji judging him for it. Shiho, at least, may have cautioned him things wouldn't work out in the past, but at this point, none of that matters. Shinichi strikes me as the sort of person who would, when push comes to shove, rely on his own counsel first, even though when it comes to detective work more people collaborating is usually better.

In the first third or so, there is emphasis on the personality Shinichi projects. As with Amari and Shiho, Shinichi projects a personality that is bulletproof and charming, even though when around people whom he's comfortable with he can be impatient, rude, and socially awkward to the point of seeming insensitive. This duality of personality echoes throughout the entire piece, with Shiho, Amari, and even with Noto, albeit to a lesser extent.

On Leze, Time, and Entropy

I worked out through outlining that I was interested in time being the major enemy of the detective, but I extended that idea and developed it through the draft, and it's one of the ever-present themes throughout _Nagano_. The past taints the present, irreversibly so, even when much of it has already been lost and forgotten. Shiho seeks to obliterate parts of her past in order to live a new life, but she can't give up too much of it (can't take up Ishikawa's offer, can't get away from APTX as a means to move forward, can't make a new history for herself that is totally insulated from her experiences fighting the Organization in Tokyo). Ishikawa can't obliterate her past and still find peace. Amari's mother lies about what really happened to her husband and, in doing so, perpetuates tension between her and her in-laws. In keeping with the physical laws of thermodynamics, trying to erase information in fact generates more evidence of it. Of course, such information may be more difficult to reconstitute for humans since we wield limited powers over space and time, much less than someone who can manipulate the universe from the scale of galaxies to subatomic particles. We are not gods. Then again, even gods cannot predict the outcomes of quantum interactions using the laws of physics.

Most crucially, I felt I had to answer the question of why Shiho wouldn't stay as Ai. It seems often taken for granted that she would give up her original identity once the main conflict with the Organization ends. Part of _Nagano_'s reason for being is to imagine how and why Shiho would chart a different course.

On Romance

Admittedly, I'm disappointed in the romance in this piece, or at least, it doesn't meet the level that I'd originally intended. At one point I'd hoped that the story could be read two ways—as Shinichi and Shiho meeting for the first time and falling in love; or as the two of them meeting again after years apart and doing the same. I've addressed why I couldn't maintain the first possibility, but the greater question of why the romance doesn't work out as planned remains. In short, it doesn't fit the mood of the story and the initial tension with Shiho trying to keep her life in Tokyo separate from Nagano. Other drafts, with Shiho and Shinichi starting out more warmly, had a more overt romantic bend.

That being said, I think the conclusion for the story is fitting. At the start of the story, Shinichi and Shiho are both nursing wounds—some long-festering, others more recent. They are now in position to move ahead with their lives, and they should have no limits on their future together.

Where We Go Now

I don't anticipate a follow-up to _Nagano_. It has been the comprehensive story of Shiho's future beyond the series and how she comes to terms with it. Anything that tackles the future beyond this piece would be only tenuously connected to it, as far as I can imagine. It would be a sequel that has to maintain continuity without any of the benefits of doing so. At this point, the story of Noto, Ishikawa, and Amari should fade away.

I have long promised a bookstore AU story. It may come in time. I had meant to work on it over the last CoAi week, but it wasn't ready, and I would like to reconsider it now, given time and space.

Beyond that, I'm still working on an original piece called _The Parallel Murders_. I hope that will come too, in time.

Thank you for reading. Until next time.

-Muphrid

2019 September 15


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